RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
3d ago
Also, take Australia. Australia gets far more Asian grinders than the US ever did, indeed, it has some of the most elite immigration in the world measured by your system. And yet, it has stagnated against the US in the last decade in GDP terms and is facing heavy anti-immigrant backlash.
I feel like there might be a breadcrumbs effect that is under-explored. Basically, every ultra-competent (in the sense of being simultaneously highly intelligent and highly conscientious and highly agentic, and so on) person in the world, if they are interested in leaving their country and going to the west, will try to get into the US first and foremost, since it's the powerhouse #1. And since they are ultra-competent, they will find a way in. Every single other western country - no matter how hard they're working to have selective immigration - will only get the breadcrumbs from this, only people who either aren't quite competent enough to get into the US or who want to go to another country for idiosyncratic reasons, like already having family present there. And worse, this effect is cascading down: If not the US, then it's north-western europe, which also isn't even terribly hard to get into for a reasonably motivated individual.
To be sure as long as you're not screwing up the selection you're still getting reasonably competent, unproblematic individuals. But I wouldn't be surprised if Australia in particular gets the chaff of the grinders: Those that needed to grind extra-hard just to barely make it.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
3d ago
Not everything needs to be HBD. The UK is just generally very centralized around London (for various reasons, some sensible, some not), London is in the south, QED. There is also some other factors, like the canal boosting a variety of industries. If you look at a GPD per capita map, it also looks to me mostly like a London effect, with only some far smaller Scottish cities doing similarly well like Edinburgh, Glasgow or Aberdeen.
There are some possible splits in the UK, like celtic vs anglo/saxon heritage, and there is some evidence that celts might consistently lack behind across countries, but it's somewhat weak and I'm not even sure that there is a substantial differential in heritage between north/south england anyway so it might be completely irrelevant.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
3d ago
I'm not aware of major new developments in germany. I'm going with "nothing ever happens" on this one; It will probably stay illegal bc there is no solid constituency to get it changed (no, men in general don't count; Caring about paternity implies that you think it plausible for your wife to cheat on you, which is pathetic), but laws will also not get more punitive bc many cases in practice are at least somewhat sympathetic (if you care enough to break the law about this, there is probably a clear reason for it).
For the record, I'd prefer if genetic sampling on birth was (opt-out-able) standard practice and would involve paternity testing by default, as well as testing for a host of inheritable diseases and whatnot.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
3d ago
I find it really frustrating how often HBD gets dismissed, and then an alternative explanation is given that is perfectly compatible with HBD. Usually connected to the assumption that HBD is about either differences between people being either 100% genetics and/or that it's just about black vs white.
No, HBD is simply about the finding that genes/biology in humans matter for everything, even for those attributes where the implications are a bit unpleasant. Yes, some people are just more violent. Some people are just less conscientious. And yes, some people are just less intelligent. It's not even their fault so I have a lot of sympathy with them, in a way. But it's not claiming that environment has no influence at all; That's just silly.
Once you accept this, group differences follow directly. Let's take brain drain. If we accept that intelligence is, say 60% genetic, and that a place suffers from a large percentage of intelligent people leaving, what does this imply about the group that has left vs the group that stayed behind? It's nearly mathematically impossible for both groups to have the same genetic mean afterwards! It would require some convoluted simultaneous anti-selection. And this applies in one way or another to every large migration wave. There is always some reason why people leave, and that reason will have implications for group differences between the stayers vs the leavers. Also, this applies of course to the average, not to literally every single person in each group.
Of course, this is hardly the only dynamic; The recent Reich paper shows clear evidence for ongoing selection even just inside west eurasia and in particular shows that the idea of cultural evolution supplanting biological evolution is simply wrong; They work in tandem with each other. Which makes perfect sense: If a society requires substantial long-term planning for winter months, then you will have both cultural adaption to do so and biological selective pressure towards more conscientiousness, intelligence, etc. Likewise, living in literal centuries of civilization with a highly developed tax code such as China will plainly have different selective pressures than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Also, an aside: It's perfectly sensible to say that HBD is more important for differences inside developed states than for the differences between the developed vs the undeveloped world, since the latter has larger environmental differences. The black-white gap inside the US is probably substantially more genetic than the Europe-Africa gap. And this fits very well with the data, since the latter is significantly larger, even accounting for admixture.
Coming back to this post, assuming HBD is true, it makes sense that people with
Cultural antibodies hardened over a millenium that rejects the state, trusting strangers, higher IQ institutions
will also have substantially biologically adapted to that environment. Or the other way around, if we assume the differences currently holding them back were pre-existing, than we would of course expect them to fare badly in international warfare and regularly get conquered and colonized. I agree with @SecureSignals that at least part of the difference here is likely pre-existing.
Now you may ask, if HBD is so compatible with everything, when does it really fail? That's simple: I lean towards cultural/environmental explanations where the split is historically recent, and/or where there is little evidence for plausible, sufficiently large genetic differences. NK vs SK is the gold-standard here. Korea has historically always been relatively developed and well-managed. Koreans are of course not perfectly homogenous, every group has subgroups, but it's relatively isolated and as homogenous as it gets. The split is an inheritance of WW2, which is quite recent. And it's at this point well-known that neither communism nor most other autocratic governments are very conducive to economic development, so the cultural explanation makes very plain sense.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
5d ago
Yeah, you're really not helping my impression here. Progressives literally say 100% the same. It's fine to be a conservative religious, as long as you're like one of the good ones in their tv shows who lives a conservative lifestyle and is spiritual in some undefined way, but who doesn't actually espouse any conservative values nor seems to have strong specific religious convictions, either. And certainly doesn't "spread hate" about trans people, or "threatens reproductive rights" or whatever.
It's true in a sense, you can mostly live life just fine as a religious conservative as long as you don't trigger random progressive activists.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
6d ago
Did you ever feel like your fellow Americans hated you? Maybe I’m being histrionic but I guess 2016-2024 I just need knew fellow Americans were capable of doing things they did to me then. Like evil. The America I grew up with was united. Muslims hit us and we would all go kill them together. But 2016-2024 we were enemies with each other. It’s like losing my innocent. A civil war I never saw coming. And it honestly feels like we almost lost and America was over.
I'm not american, but welcome to how atheists (and gays, and so on) felt under the moral-majority-style religious right. It was the same kind of split were the moderate religious right was publicly saying not believing was fine, but they were actively politically allying (and thus empowering) a more rabid wing that would regularly go after people who do something that goes against their beliefs. Like, it's fine to be an atheist, as long as you don't do anything that might offend random christian activists.
To be fair, the woke actually still feels worse to me since it has more internal institutional backing inside academia, but there definitely is some symmetry here.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
6d ago
If I understand it correctly, the loss is at least capped at the original value of the 100 shares. Basically, you gain the advantage of owning stock without having to put up the same investment up-front, but you should have at least have a substantial percentage of the money for those 100 shares lying around in some way regardless so that you don't have to take a loan if things go south. But if you do this with multiple investment schemes that are in theory un- or only weakly correlated, then you can use the same stack of money as a guarantee for all of them without ever going negative.
No, I am promoting the idea that, when we choose to incarcerate certain persons, thus denying them the ability to either defend themselves or avoid attackers, we have assumed a corresponding duty to protect every single one of them from violent assault to the best of our abilities, and do not have the right to condemn a certain fraction of them to constant victimisation because protecting them is inconvenient.
I find the differences in the conceptualisation of prisons quite interesting. To many, especially right-wingers and some conservatives, punishment is the point of prison, so some background level of victimization is, if anything, morally positive. To you and large parts of the progressive wing of the left, prison is a choice we hoist upon certain people, maybe even for some utilitarian benefit overall, but the fact that we do so against their will means we have some obligations towards them. To me, the point for me personally is simply just separation between us and them (as such, I consider exile the ideal punishment, it's unfortunately just not really available anymore); If they then choose to victimize each other, that is on them. Since anyone in prison is by definition a victimizer (technically only allegedly, I know), the oppressor-victim dichotomy is an absurdly bad match anyway. I actually prefer if they treat each other well, too, I just think we have relatively little obligation towards them. At least in my country, prisons are already more than nice enough, nor are prisoners lacking food or other amenities.
None of these conceptualisations is strictly speaking wrong, and they lend themselves to wildly different conclusions.
Yeah, Duggan is imo 100% wrong. This has nothing to do with ideology - today's social media is anything but cyberlibertarian anyway - and everything to do with what stupid and crazy people are like. They always existed, and always had these ideas. The only thing that has changed is that Duggan can now see them. Nothing got worse - if anything from my impression, the internet makes correct information easier to get than ever: Before, if you grew up in a crackpot community you might literally be unaware of the viability of alternative viewpoints well into your teens. Same deal for the relatively ubiquitous benign moderate religious communities. I've grown up in the latter, and we still had plenty of crackpots, too. Not to mention that Duggan seems like the kind of person who would like to just generally ban any speech to the right of Bernie Sanders.
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