RobertLiguori
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User ID: 165
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
For me, it's just parsimony. I have no faith in colleges in general any more, and Sam has demonstrated his ability to manipulate elite institutions, and is also a goober. It could be that he is high-IQ and a goober, or that he's a goober all around and simply bamboozled MIT the same way he did a bunch of others - or it might be that he simply had a lucky interpersonal-connection 'in' to MIT that would have worked whether his boiling-hot IQ was measured in C or F.
I also think it's probably fairly unlikely that we'll get hard data either way, especially now, given the extended time that's passed from any potential objective-ish evaluations like AP exams or SATs. Also, nowadays, it would be trivial for someone of his resources to game a few slightly-harder-to-fake signals, like a ghostwritten StackOverflow profile and some boilerplate personal projects on a GitHub account.
But given the sheer stupidity and utter agnosticism towards the very idea of personal consequences he has displayed so far, I feel like I can safely say he's probably real dumb, in the classic sense, excepting for his ability to lie and manipulate people (which, in fairness, is a non-trivial skill, but also one not necessarily interacting with deep math, science, and programming geekery). I predict that no actual evidence of Sam doing anything difficult and valuable with anything not vulnerable to social pressure, where the results can be verified (meaning mostly math or programming, since those are things I feel I could verify myself) will be found. I am not super-invested in this theory, and I happily admit this is purely a balance-of-probabilities as I see it; I'd be delighted for someone to turn up, e.g., a deeper dive into Sam's LoL rankings, if nothing more objective can be found.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
Can we see the math and logic he's said to have done?
I ask because I remember there being something of a dive into his League of Legends ranking based on the infamous investor call, and apparently he was not at all ranked the way a genius mathlete willing to put in the hours would be at all, and also because I myself have seen a lot of people who associate with smart, nerdy things entirely for smart, nerdy cred, and whose actual ability to engage with the crunchy, mathy, requires-focus-and-practice bits of them is completely nonexistent.
I'd absolutely believe that Sam got top marks entirely based on his family and social connections and the fact that a prep school is about making him look good for a college environment that has completely desisted from actual educational discernment. It's absolutely the case that smart people can believe very dumb things, especially when those dumb beliefs are serving as vital shields for their self-image, and that high-IQ memorize-loads-of-facts-and-do-novel-work-with-them types can end up carefully compartmentalizing against the heresies of their day and circle, and get badly bitten when their failure to think in that one context happens to arise.
But until I see Sam's math SAT scores or evaluate some complex code he's written, I'm personally going to hold off on claiming that he's smart.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
Do you have a graph comparing the educational outcomes of middle-class two-parent black Americans to non-middle-class non-two-parent Jewish-Americans?
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
As an aside, I think that you can probably do the same thing yourself for racism. I know that I've had a fair amount of conversations on whether a particular racially-motivated act of discrimination was racist or not, and when I've sensed some confusion around the term, I've gotten good responses by explicitly recognizing and disclaiming some popular alternate definitions of the word, and emphasized that I was referring to racially-motivated acts of discrimination.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
Hmm. I don't think that the circumstances of recent Nigerian immigrants actually do mirror, e.g., those of turn-of-the-century Chinese immigrants particularly well, but I'd be interested to hear you break down what you think the salient features of Asian immigrant waves were, and how they compare to the circumstances of the given Nigerian wave.
We've got a lot of immigrants to a lot of nations being done by a lot of ethnic groups across a lot of history for a lot of reasons under a lot of circumstances; we should be able to tell pretty quickly which of those factors (if any of them) most saliently predict outcomes.
Sure, I'll give you two numbers. First from [1]:
The College Board’s publicly available data provides data on racial composition at 50-point score intervals. We estimate that in the entire country last year at most 2,200 black and 4,900 Latino test-takers scored above a 700. In comparison, roughly 48,000 whites and 52,800 Asians scored that high. The same absolute disparity persists among the highest scorers: 16,000 whites and 29,570 Asians scored above a 750, compared to only at most 1,000 blacks and 2,400 Latinos. (These estimates—which rely on conservative assumptions that maximize the number of high-scoring black students, are consistent with an older estimate from a 2005 paper in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which found that only 244 black students scored above a 750 on the math section of the SAT.)
From [2]: (It's interactive and tabular, so you'll have to click around)
In the Homicide Offender vs. Victim demographics, we see that pernicious hate ratio again (with blacks committing 51% of all murders in the U.S. over the past 10 years, and Asians committing less than 1% of murders.) And, as our control, white people ring in 36% of the murders. The remaining 11% are done by a racially-unknown perpetrator.
With blacks being a relatively-consistent 12% of the population and Asians being 6%, we would expect to see ~12% and about 6% of murders. White people with Latinos rolled in (which, for some reason, the violent crime stats always do) get us to 76% of the population.
I will leave pulling the actual p-values as an exercise to the reader, but the numbers are clear; race has an immediate, obvious, and dramatic impact; if you are black, you are several times more likely than average to be a murderer (with, of course, the proviso that the vast, vast majority of black people are not criminals, and 5 times a very small number is still a small number overall), and likewise, if you are Asian, you are several times more likely then average to score a 700+ on the SAT (with, again, the same proviso that only a small minority of that small minority are exemplary math students.) It is absolutely not the case that every black is a dumb violent criminal, and that every Asian is a peaceful geometer-hobbyist. But it is true that black people are wildly overrepresented in violent crime and underrepresented in mathematical achievement, and that the reverse is true for Asians.
Now, I don't have any sources I particularly trust for the dual-parent question, because I haven't examined it, but a quick perusal of sources did give me an entry from the Institute for Family Studies[3], which didn't seem to obviously contradict the other few sources. It gave the percent of Asian children from two-married-parent homes at 85%, with 74% for non-Hispanic whites and 36% for black children. This, obviously, is a much closer outcome ratio than we see in the two above outcome cases; if coming from a broken home was the primary determinant, then we'd see those 15% of 6% (0.9%) do as much crime proportionally as 63% of 12% (7.56%). And yet, the ratio of Asian super-achievement on the SAT to black is 25 to 1; when it comes to violent criminals, the ratio is well over a hundred to one.
As far as I can see, getting married and raising a family is just another outcome in which Asians do better than the average, and black Americans do significantly worse. But I would be fascinated to see if you can find any studies which specifically compare the the outcomes of children of two-parent black households to non-two-parent Jewish and Asian households, to really get into family status as a signifier on its own.
Also, to be clear; this is not a melanin thing. Asians have more melanin than whites, and do better. Blacks have more melanin than whites, and do worse. It's also a purely-statistical truth; we can absolutely drill down to the Igbo or Laotian immigrant populations and see divergent results. Black and Asian are both large, diverse groups which contain many, many, many subgroups, and of course, the individual is the smallest and most significant subgroup of all.
2: https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend
3: https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-majority-of-us-children-still-live-in-two-parent-families
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
How much is a very large part? Can you list off a few specific metrics in which you believe that black Americans underperform, give the relative numbers for some other races, and then estimate where you'd expect the needles to be absent the legacy entirely? Can you also provide what you'd expect the numbers to look like for other races in a hypothetical no-discrimination-at-all environment?
I mean, you do have some kind of "X specific discrimination which happened in these specific ways at these times caused these gaps, which I expect to persist for this many generations.", right? It would be very silly to claim that you had any idea what the expected but-for-slavery-and-Jim-Crow outcomes of black Americans relative to all other colors of American would be absent that kind of comparison, after all.
Let's get some actual numbers around this, both in terms of how you see things now, and how you'd expect to see things differently with a few specific point interventions.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
Do you have some numbers here to back this up? It would be great grounding point if you could put a dollar figure to, for instance, how much poorer your Jewish parents would need to be than a black couple for you to have the same expected educational and crime outcomes as said couple's hypothetical child.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
Again, I bring up what those two factors would imply about the pool of non-immigrants; if we assume that groups are blank slates, then we should see the same demographic outcomes in non-immigrants from Nigeria, and from Israel. Do we? And again, does this assumption encode American original-colonist exceptionalism as an expected outcome, where we should assume that the best outcomes should belong to the stock of those that did the hardest initial work on arrival? Do you think there is any reversion-to-the-mean going on, and at what rate?
And yes, I'm being vague. From my perspective, I'm a guy who can watch the night sky and has an OK memory hearing astrologers confidently announce that a plague is happening because Mercury is in retrograde and that is what causes plagues, and lining up that with the other times I know that Mercury was in retrograde and there was no plague. I am not a doctor or a microbiologist or even an astronomer, but I don't need to be; all I need to do is evaluate "Does condition X, which I hear people claim as the reason for this observable event in the world Y, actually correlate with Y, or do we have cases of X not causing Y and in fact being associated with the opposite of Y?"
My own default position is vague because it's complicated. My thoughts are that sets like black Americans and Jews are a huge, confounded mass of distinct lineages and cultural influences, and that what might be true about subsets of those groups could not be true about the whole. My default position is that while knowing someone's race gives you information about their likely group outcomes, every group contains diligent sinners and callow saints and that looking at the individual in front of you and tracing their specific life outcomes to their specific choices and reactions to the events of their own specific life is the only way to get a non-statistical answer.
And so, if anyone is going to say "But for X, these groups which have wildly divergent group outcomes would have near-identical ones.", then they'd better be able to show the general principle first that groups are not distinct in the absence of X, and second that X moves the needle for a high confidence interval of groups that I can think of in the expected direction."
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
If historical discrimination was the primary driver of group outcomes, then we could look at two groups which had suffered similarly, and confidently predict that they have similar outcomes relative to an undiscriminated-against control group. This is not the case; you can suffer historic discrimination and be either wildly above-mean in outcomes, or distinctly below-mean in outcomes. (And, of course, you can as an individual be in the above-mean group and fail hard, or in the below-mean group and succeed hugely.)
Because discrimination does not necessarily lead to lesser outcomes and can in fact lead to greater outcomes, it cannot be the primary driver. At least, that's how I'm understanding the term; if you have a different understanding, please feel free to elaborate. Or alternately, if you want to claim that Jewish and Asian overperformance in the face of discrimination is a historic fluke specific to a place and time, reminiscent to a legless man winning a marathon due to a series of freak coincidences (while having functioning legs is still generally the primary driver of winning footraces) and that we should expect to see Asians and Jews with comparable outcomes to American blacks in other areas and times, feel free to make that case as well.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
With respect, I think you're misreading me. I am making no argument as to why there are group differences; I am simply pointing out that a frequently-given explanation (prior trauma) is clearly and obviously a non-answer. Clearly, races are distinct in terms of outcome at the group-aggregate level; equally-clearly, we see that outcomes of races do not correlate directly with discrimination.
I do think that we've got a lot to untangle if we did want to claim it's all group-founder effects. If we posit that the primary determinant in group outcomes is subgroup selection and founder effects, we could also look at the outcomes of indentured servants who were shipped across to the burgeoning Americas as well; if selection effects explains all, then we should find a clear delineation in demographic destiny between the children of free colonists and indentured servants (who we would expect to be very close to the descendants of slaves). We could also dig into the histories of Irish immigrants who came over en masse in response to the Famine, as well as digging into those sentenced to transportation to, e.g., Australia.
Of course, the big issue is that if the secret sauce is selection effects and we're just getting the cream of the crop from various nations, then we could look at the pool of people who didn't immigrate from various nations and see if the world really is divided into Economic Go-Getters and Everyone Else. And now that I mention it, wouldn't the descendants of the original American colonists be the ultimate economic migrants? Shouldn't we see parity between their descendants and the others?
Again, I make no claim as to why group outcome difference exists. I just note that it does, that it's durable, and that historic discrimination doesn't account for it. As far as I'm concerned, the reason for different group outcomes is that people are different, and groups contain different people, and because I believe this, I am very skeptical of any "But for Factor X, these groups of people would have identical outcomes."
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
How do you know there is a difference? Do you have a list of multiple peoples who were chattel slaves, and their relative performance over time during, immediately after, and generations after?
This isn't a gotcha; I myself do not have statistics ready to spring on you, and would be interested to know, e.g., how the descendants of the Roman empire's slaves did, if there is any such data (or even widely-present stereotypes).
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
HBD is an answer to the question "Why do different races have persistent group outcomes?". I was asking a different question; specifically, "Why do people frequently claim something clearly specious (group rates of discrimination) to explain (one particular set of) group differences, when literally minutes of thought and research is enough to disprove it?"
I mean, the answer might be "Claiming anti-black discrimination explains all group outcomes is a matter of Wokist doctrine solely, and no one ever advanced the argument in good faith, and its common presence simply indicates how far public discourse has fallen.", but I figured I should at least ask people to take stabs at the argument first.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
So, I've made this post more or less verbatim a few times, every time the idea of discrimination as the driving force for differing outcomes in racial groups gets brought up as a justification for the relative poor performance of black Americans. I figure I may as well make it as a top-level comment, and see if anyone has any serious critique of it.
Historical discrimination is not the primary driver of group outcomes. Slavery and Jim-Crow-era policies are frequently brought up as justification for the relative underperformance of black Americans. However, it is clear that this is not the case generally, when one looks at literally any other group. I personally prefer to use Jews in this example, because of how many points of similarity I can make; Jews were historically relegated to ghettos and denied economic opportunities, chased out of their homes repeatedly, suffered public outbreaks of mob violence, had their successful businesses plundered, and, for a time, had it generally considered that basketball was their sport. Jews, historically, have suffered serious discrimination, for longer than African-Americans have literally existed. And yet, the mean outcomes of Jewish Americans are above the majority. If it were the case that historic discrimination was the sole or even primary driver of group outcomes, as in the frequently-used metaphor of a racer given a handicap which is removed partway through the race, we would expect the group outcome of Jews to be well behind the majority. We do not see this; Jews commit relatively little violent crime, make relatively more money, and achieve relatively more scholastically. We see a similar pattern with (some) Asian immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, who came to the U.S. with very little, suffered significant discrimination and group violence, and yet their descendants are now in a similar situation.
It does not matter if this racial ordering is due to genes, culture, or a giant racial conspiracy detailed in the Protocols of the Elders of Martha's Vinyard; the point is that the existence of these groups shows clearly that discrimination does not necessarily lead to lesser outcomes.
There are a few attempts at counterarguments I've heard. The most common is special pleading; the claim is made that the specific discrimination against black Americans was unique, and that while other groups have had individual pieces discrimination applied, the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts. As theories go, it's of course unfalsifiable; if there is some dark alchemy of historic appearances which, when inflicted on any group, would force them into group outcomes comparable to black Americans, then the less likely it becomes that history would track it exactly as time changes. The follow-up, of course, is simply that the dark alchemy has already happened and that it has left a stain on the character of black Americans, such that racism in their favor is needed now due to their persistent inferiority; this is, of course, simply racism with one extra step, and can be ignored just as the claims that black Americans carry the curse of Ham and must repent to YHWH with an appropriate sacrifice could be.
Another claim is to dig into the specifics. Jews (and Slavs, and others) were enslaved, but not as recently as blacks. Of course, other races suffered from redlining, but blacks had it the worst. Sure, the victims of lynching were surprisingly varied when you look into the details, and if you look at the KKK's traditional enemies you will see that they did not simply target blacks, but surely blacks were the worst-off in all of these cases? Well, perhaps, and perhaps not. I don't need to weigh how many Tulsa Race Riots make up a Krystalnacht; I just need to claim that they were both bad, that they happened to different people, and that the group outcomes of one group are above-average while the others are below. If the claim is that the current position of black Americans is primarily due to racism, and not "Well, sure, obviously they'd be below every other race in every metric we care about if there wasn't historical racism, they'd just be less behind.", then that is an argument that might be worth engaging with, but unless you're already attempting to split those hairs, I don't really find it so.
But the reason I'm bringing this up here is that by far the single most common response I've had to this argument is silence (or being silenced, when I bring it up in Wokist-controlled spaces). Repeatedly, I've heard people make some assertion about relative underperformance of black Americans (and only black Americans) being due to historic discrimination, repeatedly I've brought up the presence of other groups who have suffered historic (and current) discrimination and who relatively overperform, and repeatedly, receive no answer, neither a "That's clearly wrong." or even a "Hmm, let me think about that." It is because of that silence that I wanted to bring this up as a top-level post, because I've made it so many times and never had it challenged. My feeling is that the argument is not really an argument; it's an attempt to bring up emotively-charged history to justify current discrimination, and that literally no one who makes the argument started by looking at a bunch of racial groups, looking at their relative performance and historic ill- or well-treatment, and drawing a graph to prove that historic mistreatment generations ago leads to poor outcomes today.
If you want to disprove that 'literally' above, I invite you to post. I don't get how my argument can seriously be novel, when even a Wiki-skim level of history and literal first-week-in-logic analysis (Persons B have property D. Persons J have property D. Persons B have outcome Bad. Persons J do not have outcomes Bad. Does property D imply bad outcomes?) is enough to generate it. So, since I keep seeing it get treated as novel, here I am, posting this.
I have left a list of citations off of this post, because I believe all of the factual claims made (black Americans earn less money, commit more crimes, and do more poorly in school, while Jewish and some Asian groups earn more, crime less, and school harder, and that all groups have suffered notable historic discrimination.) are taboo, but not actually controversial. If it is necessary, I can post a reply to this with a list of sources, but I do not feel that these statements are either partisan or inflammatory.
RobertLiguori
2yr ago
If one starts from that assumption, then one would observe that there are minorities (Jews, some Asians) who are More Likely than whites, yet have suffered more discrimination than them.
This would mean that it has to be a Jewish and partially Asian conspiracy to suppress all the other races, and that any observed historic anti-black discrimination is marginal compared to the discrimination dark matter of the Jews.
Barring a very small minority, people don't start from that assumption. They use the historic treatment of blacks as a rhetorical club, and under no circumstances permit actual science or reason to touch their assumed Original Sin substitute. But it's so stupidly obvious when you add more data points than white American and black American, and look at the relationship between historic oppression and current outcomes, I tend to default to assuming that no one actually starts with that assumption.
I feel like the fact that Jane Street paid Sam a very nice salary to manage crypto trades for them is pretty strong evidence against their own smarts.
But, less facetiously, I'd like to lay out my default assumption here, based on what I've seen of SBF's work and statements so far; he is not IQ <90, and he has ruthlessly exploited the high-trust presumption of society, and because of that, I trust not a single word or explanation that comes from his mouth, nor those of people who would plausibly gain by his own gains. Given his willingness to spend money on regulators and punish dissenters, the general halo effect, and the fact that I know well how easily the job interview process gets twisted in general, I am not willing to assign Jane St. the same impartial evaluation trust that I would a math SAT scantron machine, or a compiler attempting to compile code he wrote.
Again, I don't think that he is an idiot. But I do think that he has absolutely adopted the appearance of smart nerdy things consciously, as part of a presented image, and that I need to consider everything about him from an adversarial position.
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