IguanaBowtie
No bio...
User ID: 946
IguanaBowtie
10mo ago
I'll happily admit that my two suggestions are awful, but I know they would work and I'm not sure that's the case with your proposals.
Test either two parents and a kid, or two kids and a parent.
Assuming we know we're creamskimming from a population with significantly worse outcomes on average than our own, this sample size isn't big enough to be relevant in figuring out if the family is from a good-outcomes subgroup (assuming such groups meaningfully exist) or if they're outliers who got lucky and had a kid that didn't regress to the mean too much. If it's the latter, you're going to be having problems in 5-15 years and not 60-90, as France is finding out right now.
That said, it does hint at an interesting solution where immigration authorites could do careful geneological work and data analysis on potential immigrants, to connect the relevant educational attainment and available testing results across large populations, to try to identify these high-performance subgroups. But again, though less horrible than my original suggestions, it still smacks far too much of eugenics ('racial credit scores'?) to be seriously considered. As opposed to quietly raising barriers to immigration from certain countries while easing them from others.
IguanaBowtie
11mo ago
There's an underappreciated element here IMO: the instinctive refusal to utter fighting words while not being a fighter. The brain is capable of marvelous feats of self-deception & motivated reasoning not only in order to protect its self-image, but also to physically protect itself from harm, ie. by preventing the adoption of beliefs that will get its owner's ass kicked.
How often do we straightforwardly tell another person "I'm smarter than you"? I've never done it; I imagine most people haven't. With good reason: it's a challenge, 'fighting words', as it fairly directly implies 'so we should do things my way if we come to a disagreement' AKA 'I'm in charge now.' This isn't something any social structure can let stand, but modern white America even less than most, with its reliance upon poorly-defined social hierarchy for avoiding conflict. (See: VKR's Gametalk) If you're middle class, went to university or worked for a corporation, chances are very good that you've been extensively trained to subconciously avoid conflicts of precisely this type, and it may well be that this taboo is load-bearing. Scaled up, saying 'my group is smarter than your group' has even more serious social ramifications, again independent of the statement's truth value. Pretending it isn't so may be the best alternative.
IguanaBowtie
4mo ago
The problem with this is that The Mellowing that comes from constructive interaction with capitalism is dependent on actually being able to interact with capitalism. The average banlieue resident doesnt have much to offer in the French marketplace, and even their unskilled labor is mostly devalued and surplus. I dont see this situation improving, either.
IguanaBowtie
9mo ago
Real question, why do construction bosses prefer Jose to Bubba? Common non-class-associated Hispanic name vs highly lower-class associated white name?
IguanaBowtie
10mo ago
That's about a 4% annualized return, only 'good' because the stock market tanked that year. But it's still not terribly exciting given the built-in risk of losing your shirt running any sort of entertainment company, even a tbtf one like Disney, and given their relative box-office dominance it seems beyond underwhelming. If I was a major shareholder in a the titan of the industry, I'd want to know why they weren't crushing it!
IguanaBowtie
10mo ago
Sure, depending on how you define the subgroup, but if you can figure out a good category-marker that isolates a population with consistent differences in outcomes or measurable cognitive ability, go for it. You might end up cleaving along cultural lines rather than genetic, but if it reproduces in the new environment it's all good.
It's possible that the original point still stands even if nerds are a small minority of all rapists, if being raped by a nerd is percieved as much worse than being raped by a non-nerd.
I don't know how much this corresponds with reality, but there is definitely at least some extra 'yuck' factor associated with sexual violence when perpetrated by very-low value males.
Alternately, if 'tolerating male proximity' is a tradeoff between various social goods & risk of sexual violence, tolerating males who are low-risk but have low (or zero) social capital to trade can easily become a worse tradeoff than chumming around with high-risk high-reward men.
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