BANNED USER: /comment/193024
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
Failed repeatedly in his attempts to die a hero and has now lived long enough to become the villain.
User ID: 659
Banned by: @cjet79
There was no manipulation/lowering of actual test scores based on race,
That's where you are wrong. A major part of the scandal was that it was revealed in discovery that the NFL had attempted to use the lower "race-normalized" scores to justify reduced payouts even in cases where the initial score for an individual player were available. Only problem being they got caught by a player who'd saved a copy of their initial scores and subsequently challenged the ruling.
If you ask me "We didn't actually get away with it, so you can't blame us for trying" isn't much of defense.
Edited to be less antagonistic.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
I think a better way to understand the fundamental conflict is to think less in terms of "unthinkable trade-offs" and more in terms of "necessary evils" More pointedly that utilitarianism as it is typically advocated for in rationalist spaces does not seem to handle such scenarios gracefully. Instead of being able to acknowledge that [action] is bad but [action] was also necessary/understandable given the circumstances it instead seems to default to a position where [action] was necessary/understandable given the circumstances ergo [action] cannot be bad and must have actually been good or at least neutral.
I see Scott's defense of Fauci in this post here and his earlier posts on Kolmogorov Complicity and the Virtue of Silence as classic examples of the problem, sure sometimes betraying the public trust is the rational choice, but by betraying the public trust you have demonstrated yourself to be untrustworthy and can no longer honestly claim to be "the sort of person who cooperates in prisoners dilemmas" because you aren't, you're a defector.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
Ok, you reject that both axes of plot are proxies for intelligence.
To the degree that IQ is measuring something real, I think that what it is measuring is something along the lines of "Academic Aptitude" or "Proclivity for symbol manipulation", and that this quality is only somewhat correlated with the ability to recognize, retain, and reason from/act upon changing information states.
If someone is reaching for HBD, is it because it actually helps them interact with those around them in a charitable and mutually beneficial way or because they're sculpting society inside of their head?
Yes, there is certainly a strong element of this in my approach.
I don't think it's a coincidence that those who seem to be most invested in the explanatory power of "Bio-determisnism" and various other structural "isms" also seem to be decidedly against what one might call "traditional western values". Describing Christianity as a "slave" or "cuck" religion/morality, and leaning heavily on the gay in "fully automated luxury gay space communism".
Yes you have been following me around and yes it has been kind of annoying partially because I strongly suspect you're a sockpuppet, and partially because you still haven't havent explained how McNamara displaying an attitude towards the lives of his nation's troops that would be more at home in a 19th century Tzarist Army than a 20th Century Western one is supposed to prove that generalizations about group differences in IQ are more predictive of future success than say living in a household with both parents present, or disprove the utility of colorblind policies.
You're just another single-issue commentor/vandal grasping at anything he can to justify his issue and his vandalism.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
I am questioning the framework upon which it rests.
Like @The_Nybbler I am deeply skeptical of educational attainment as a proxy for raw intelligence. If anything it strikes me as a case of affirming the consequent. Simple truth is that I've met too many 60th percentile ASVABs who were demonstrably capable of organizing/supervising complex evolutions involving hundreds of people and dozens of moving parts, just as I've met too many post-grads from prestigious institutions who I wouldn't trust to boil water, to take such claims at face value.
More generally I will reiterate my take from the previous thread. While Thomas Sowell does not address HBD directly I find it hard not to read his "vision of the anointed" in to pretty much everything HBDers post here. The scales falling from my eyes moment was when the Wonderlic "Race Norming" scandal came to light in 2019, and a significant portion of users here defended it. To be clear, The NFL had been collecting Wonderlic score on players since the late 70s, and what they got caught doing was artificially adjusting the scores of high-performing black players downward to change the racial distribution of disability payouts. On a dime I saw users who had claimed to support standardized testing flip from "the data obviously supports our conclusion" to "we must correct manipulate the data to better reflect the truth". This is what might be called in another context; "saying the quiet part out loud" and it exposes the fact that HBD as it is advocated for here on theMotte and more generally amongst rationalists is much more of a normative belief than a descriptive one. An argument over "ought"s rather "are"s.
Yes, I catch lot of flak on this forum for maintaining that Utilitarianism is a stupid and evil ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing, but I feel that the discourse surrounding HBD is an apt illustration of the problem. Once you've gone on the record in defense of lying or manipulating data to defend your preferred narrative or achieve your preferred policy outcomes, what reason does anyone else have to trust you? Contra The Sequences and Scott Alexander, information does not exist in a vacuum, and arguments do not spring fully formed from the either. The proles are not stupid. They recognize that the Devil can quote scripture, and that a liar can tell the truth when it suits them. Thus the fundamental question one must always be prepared to ask when evaluating a statement is not whether a statement is true or false, but "Cui Bono?".
Who benefits from Id Pol, HBD Awareness, and Intersectionality? Who benefits from the dismantlement of Anglo/American norms about equality of opportunity and equality before the law? I can tell you who does not benefit in anyway. Those who possess genuine individual merit.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
That's fair, and to be clear I'm not holding this against you, but this is why I describe it as a "scales falling from my eyes moment". I've already eaten a couple warnings and a ban for making comments to the effect of "[User] is a lying liar and here's the thread that proves it." which is why I dance around it now.
I don't see an excuse for not simply testing each athlete at the start of their career.
Except that this is exactly what the NFL had been doing since the 70s. The scandal, that is the behavior that users here were defending, was that the NFL got caught artificially lowering the Wonderlic scores of high-performing blacks "to more correctly reflect the baseline" (whatever that means) and (presumably) minimize disability payments to black players.
In other words, about as clear-cut a case of racial discrimination winning out over colorblind meritocracy as one could ask for. That a significant portion of active HBDers on the Motte came out against standardized testing and defended the NFL's behavior is a dead give-away for which side of the "meritocracy" debate they're really on.
Step outside your extremely-online rationalist bubble and look around.
Look at who is pushing "Racial Consciousness", Look at who is arguing that things like colorblindness and standardized testing are "problematic" or "unscientific" and where they are arguing these things. Look at what flags they are flying. Only one of the two mainstream parties in the US has been actively campaigning against meritocracy and in favor of racial discrimination and it isn't the Republicans and they aren't doing it in any of the "red" states.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
Spencer was an editor at The American Conservative in 2007.
And before that he was a student at UC Berkeley and also a self-identified Marxist, ditto Yarvin. The whole "Black Bloc kid gets mugged and starts posting hitler-memes" is such a common origin story amongst NRxers and the dissident right that it's become a meme on conservative forums. It is this archetype that I am referring to when I say that sometimes they are literally the same people.
Ron Unz ran for governor as a republican in 1994 ...
No he did not. Unz ran as a third-party candidate against incumbent Republican Governor Pete Wilson on a "revenge of the nerds" platform and he lost.
Between this and the "race norming" post up-thread where you conveniently pretend that the NFL hasn't been collecting Wonderlic scores on every new player as they enter the league since the late 70s your claims made throughout this thread have just been consistently factually wrong and it is this sort of aggressive confidence in one's own ignorance that typifies the HBD discourse here on theMotte and makes it so insufferable.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
I don't see white nationalists claiming Jews aren't intelligent.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
I'm pretty sure Hlynka's ideas are broadly similar; the low station of AADOS is mostly due to their own poor behavior, yes, but that poor behavior has mostly non-genetic causes.
I am reminded of this thread from a little over a year ago.
I watch the advocates of "innate cognitive differences" stack epicycles upon epicycles trying to explain why teaching methods don't matter, why classroom discipline does not matter, why nutrition, poverty, a tradition of literacy, a stable home-life/two-parent household, and any number of other things don't matter while arbitrarily dismissing any arguments, claims, and evidence to the contrary as "blank-slatism" and can't help but find it just as (if not even more) ridiculous.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
I don't think I am. Neither in Specific cases like Spencer, Yarvin, Unz, Sailer, Et Al. Nor in the more general category of Secular Progressive Blue/Grey-tribe Academics who mostly reside in California.
As I've observed in previous threads on the topic, that the Sunni and the Shia consider themselves to be completely different and often go to war against one another does not invalidate "Muslim" as a meaningful category.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
I think that "HBD awareness" serves same purpose on the Alt Right that "Race Consciousness" and "Social Justice" serve on the woke. That is as euphemism for the rejection of individual justice and individual merit that has become fashionable amongst queer theater kids but remains deeply unpopular amongst the general population.
It's arguments as soldiers all the way down.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
Because unlike most of the users here, I am not working backwards from a preexisting conclusion.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
the value that it adds is that it counters the argument that differences in average outcomes between ethnic groups are evidence of discrimination.
Does it though?
My impression is essentially that of @Doubletree2 below, with an additional coda from my reply to @Amadan;
"Who benefits from Id Pol, HBD Awareness, and Intersectionality? Who benefits from the dismantlement of Anglo/American norms about equality of opportunity and equality before the law? I can tell you who sure as hell doesn't benefit in anyway. Those who possess genuine individual merit."
See also Clarence Thomas' comments on Affirmative Action and the "soft bigotry" of low expectations.
Edit: Formatting
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
Fine, you want me to speak plainly let us speak plainly.
It's not like @Cimafra, @BurdensomeCount, @Hoffmietser, @SecureSignals, or our old friend Oakland Et Al. have been particularly shy about their motives. Thomas Sowell might not have mentioned HBD directly in Conflict of Visions but it hard not to read his "vision of the anointed" in pretty much everything that gets posted on the topic. Personally, the breaking point/scales falling from my eyes moment was when the Wonderlic "Race Norming" scandal came to light in 2019, and the bulk of the users here defended it. On a dime I saw users (including some who are active in this very thread right now) flip from "the data is obvious and supports our conclusion" to "we must manipulate the data to better reflect the truth". This is what might be called in another forum; "saying the quiet part out loud" and it cuts to the quick as It exposes HBD as a normative belief rather than a descriptive one. An argument over "ought"s rather "are"s.
I know I catch a lot of flak for maintaining that Utilitarianism is a stupid and evil ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing, but I feel that the discourse surrounding the topic here is an apt illustration of the problem. Once you have gone on the record in defense of lying or manipulating data to achieve your preferred policy outcomes, what reason does anyone else have to trust you? Contra the Sequences, information does not exist in a vacuum, and arguments do not spring fully formed from the either. The proles are not stupid. They recognize that the Devil can quote scripture, and that a liar can tell the truth when it suits them. Thus the fundamental question one must always be prepared to ask is not whether a statement is true or false, the question is "Cui Bono?".
Who benefits from Id Pol, HBD Awareness, and Intersectionality? Who benefits from the dismantlement of Anglo/American norms about equality of opportunity and equality before the law? I can tell you who sure as hell doesn't benefit in anyway. Those who possess genuine individual merit.
You, (that is the mod team) have made it clear my dismissal of HBD as a product of Bay-Area rationalists looking to paper over their preexisting racial and class resentments with a thin veneer of "Science!", is uncharitable and unkind and will eventually see me banned and yet if the shoe fits...
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
I think the fact that New Hampshire broke the other way kind of throws a wrench into your theory.
That the brahmins in Cambridge and New Haven hadn't quite achieved the level of state control that they wield now doesn't mean that they weren't backing Wilson
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
You tell me. What value does HBD awareness add unless one is looking to justify discrimination based on qualities other than individual merit?
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
You anticipate that adopting it would have a specific utilitarian effect.
No, I don't. I believe that those pushing it believe it will, and that belief is one of the reasons I am skeptical because contra Scott and Elizer politics doesn't happen in a vacuum.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
Then I ask you the same question that I keep asking and that no one here seems to have an answer for. Assuming for the sake of argument that HBD is true and that group differences are, as a rule, more determinative than individual variance, what of it? What value does "HBD Awareness" add over individual assessments of merit? Why promote "HBD Awareness" if not for the purposes of justifying discrimination based upon it?
I would say that I am skeptical.
I'm skeptical that whatever it is that IQ tests are testing for correlates directly with "intelligence".
I'm skeptical that "intelligence" correlates directly with individual virtue, honesty, conscientiousness, lack of criminality, leadership ability, etc...
I am also skeptical of the claim that any and all observed variations in the above can be explained purely through biology/genetics.
Subsequently I'm skeptical of the claim that if meaningful biological differences between groups exist, that the effect size of these differences outweigh the effect sizes of individual variance and/or other cultural and economic factors.
In short, I feel like the OP and his allies are stacking unfounded assumptions atop unfounded assumptions and there's really nothing more to say than that.
More options
Context Copy link