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Seppukurious

Not an hero we need right now

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joined 2022 September 06 09:47:09 UTC

				

User ID: 836

Seppukurious

Not an hero we need right now

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 06 09:47:09 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 836

HBD doesn't imply that black Americans couldn't do better overall.

No, but it does imply that they can't do as well as higher achieving groups, on average. And if the aim of Progressives is full uplift, to get them to the same level of life outcomes as everyone else, the value of spreading knowledge of HBD, conditional on HBD being true, is that you get people to stop burning money and resources on an unattainable goal.

(Well, unattainable without some serious eugenics programs, but Progressives are not likely to be fond of that plan)

Exceptions to the rules are more common than the rules themselves, and at some point attempting to teach a systemic set of exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions becomes impossible.

Zompist: hold my beer.

Eugenics?

To be fair, the first thing you should do is fund HBD research at a massive scale, so as to find out to the satisfaction of all fair-minded observers the nature and extent of racial differences in intelligence, conscientiousness and other socially-relevant cognitive traits. Then, having done that, you can get to work on your uplift project.

I suspect that there is a population of impulsive criminals who are in some sense *incapable *of not victimizing others; incapable of taking the risks of apprehension and incarceration into account, but that this shades into a population of more marginal criminals who are capable of taking the risks into account somewhat, and who tend to assume that the chances of getting caught are low enough that the severity of punishment conditional on being caught doesn't really factor into their decision on whether or not to commit a crime. Depending on how large these groups are relative to each other, it is conceivable that if certainty of punishment were raised, that would lower crime among the second group enough to more than cancel out the extra crime resulting from giving the first group shorter sentences. But I have no idea how the numbers would actually pan out on this.

(An "effendi" is a lord, or a master, in Arabic, or so I'm told)

Prince of the moonbeams, son of the Sun, the light of a thousand stars...

I do feel like the fact that that language is written with a catalog of thousands of characters instead of an alphabet could be a significant source of friction.

There is a compromise, but you're not going to like it.

I think trying to wield the weaker definitions as a rhetorical weapon cheapens actual violence against actually-vulnerable groups.

I too have noticed how counter-to-normal-language-use it is to describe as 'genocide' any effort that stands to reduce people's chances of sterilizing themselves. Though I am also reminded of the deaf community culture was over whether to give deaf children cochlear implants, which will allow them to participate in the wider society but will almost certainly result in them not being able to participate as full members in the community of sign-language-using deaf people. To the extent that deaf people are like, say, a Native American tribe that only has a few hundred people left who speak their language and practice their culture, who want to prevent it from going extinct, this does seem like a concern that has some validity.

[Edit: I should have scrolled down; this digression has already been discussed]

Not sure about that. I am capable of understanding that different racial groups have different means for IQ, but that the distributions overlap, such that there are always some high-IQ members of low-average-IQ groups who outsmart low-IQ members of high-average-IQ groups. I am capable of understanding on a vague verbal level what a standard deviation is, or principal component analysis does, in allowing intelligence researchers to conclude that there is a general cognitive ability that undergirds people's abilities on specific intellectual tasks, even if their specific mathematical, wordcel and shape rotating abilities diverge a little (or indeed in allowing population genetics researchers to plot members of different ethnic groups on graphs of two or more genetic clines). On the other hand I do not have the maths ability to calculate exactly how many people from group A will score at the 99th percentile of group A given a mean of X and a standard deviation of Y, and a population size of Z. Nor can I actually carry out a principal component analysis.

I think in this analogy I am the ten year old who understands that if you add 2 and 2, what you'll get will be a number, and that that number will be bigger than two, even if they can't calculate it as 4, which is still better than a ten year old who has no concept of what numbers are, or what addition does.

If we assume your IQ starts at 0 at birth

Sort of tangential to your main point, but IQ doesn't have a known zero anchor point, like temperature or height do. The figure of 100 as the average was arbitrarily chosen, as was the figure of 15 points to represent one standard deviation. It is therefore theoretically possible to have a negative IQ (though that would be as unlikely as having an IQ over 200). That also means that if you are anchoring your mean and your SD to the population as a whole, some subgroups will end up not only with average IQs higher or lower than 100, but also with a larger or smaller SD if their cognitive abilities are more or less widely distributed than the population as a whole.

Perhaps it would have made more sense to set the average at zero, then it would be simple to see that negative IQ just meant below average, and the number of people with X points below average would be mirrored by a comparable number of people with X points above average

The act of the union invited a penniless and embarrassed Scotland, fresh off the back of their failed attempt at colonialism, to put a Scottish King on the throne of England.

Not as I understand it - there was already a (partially-)Scottish king on the throne of England, and had been for over a century. What happened in 1707 was that the Scottish elites were bailed out financially for the Darien disaster in exchange for agreeing to merge the Scottish and English parliaments, creating a single London-based government for both countries.

There used to be a commenter on SSC whose entire schtick was something like "Everything is a popularity contest and all is lost" and he's starting to make sense to me. Moloch will have his sacrifices.

You can still follow that guy on Tumblr if you like.

samurai swords are expensive and if you use it, someone needs to wipe the blood off or it's going to mess up the steel.

I mean, the ultimate in stoic badassery would be that you use your last minutes of consciousness to wipe the sword clean yourself.

My girlfriend and I probably jaywalked

No you didn't. Another thing you may come to appreciate about British life: people are free to make their own informed decisions about when it is or isn't safe to cross the road.

I suppose they're treating 'which genes make you smart anyway' as similarly hazardous research. I can't blame them.

I can. If society makes policy on the supposition that all groups have the same inborn potential to develop their cognitive ability (or worse, the supposition that all groups have the same average cognitive ability, IQ test results be damned), then someone must be to blame for the unequal societal outcomes between groups, and modern-day witch-hunters will cause more and more damage to society, inflicting ever worse punishments on the successful, and, as their actions continue to fail to equalize societal outcomes, they can be expected to get ever more confused and angry at how powerful and well-hidden the witchcraft must be, until we reach truly civilization-crashing levels of war on competence. Egalitarian ideology in a non-egalitarian reality is dangerous, and we would do better to be willing to face the truth, whatever it turn out to be.

I think the fair response here is to ask your friend something along the lines of 'exactly what percentage of white people would be ideal for this city?'. And if you're feeling trollish, ask if they would apply the same percentage to, say, Tokyo or Kinshasa. Would be interesting to hear what the response is - at best you'd get them to articulate their reasoning.