Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
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User ID: 836
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
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.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
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.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
I don't think you understand that Europeans are themselves descended from extremely deeply diverged races.
No, I'm well aware of that. Just that after millennia of intermarriage, modern Europeans are a lot more homogenous (and largely distinct from the original Magyars, even though modern Hungarians claim continuity with them). I'm sure that the same would happen in Latin America too, given time, and barring any further large population migrations.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
From what I gather, the Magyars were a warrior nobility who converted the central European peasants (who were not really that genetically distinct from the Germanic and Slavic people around them) to speaking Hungarian, but were never that huge in number and were mostly wiped out in wars with the Mongols and the Turks. Meaning today's Hungarians aren't really all that mixed, but ... not in the way you might think.
Anyway, the census categorization that calls 'Hispanic' an ethnicity is using the word 'ethnicity' in a somewhat non-standard way. Perhaps it has to, since the people of Latin America have, like you say, such a wide spread of degrees of admixture, from pure European, pure Amerindian and pure sub-Saharan African, to any combination of the above, that there aren't really neat boxes to put people in where ancestry and culture are tightly matched. But it's not an ethnicity in the sense that, say, Welsh, or Igbo is an ethnicity; more just a hold-all cultural category for 'people from south of the US/Mexico border, at least some of whose ancestors spoke Spanish'.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
Hell, there is an entire industry of wannabe Solzhenitsyns sharing by now cliched Orwellisms that “The purpose of propaganda, at least in its late stage form, is not to inform you, or deceive you, or even manipulate you. It's to humiliate you.”
Sorry to nit-pick, but isn't that a Theodore Dalrympleism?
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
We make a little music, it's called - we make a little music.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
Fair enough. I have, but I can't remember exactly where.
(At any rate, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I am nowhere near good enough at maths to test the hypothesis)
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
One amusing consequence of (d) is that, if you are aware of the fertility-reducing effects, and if we take the ethical stance that reasonably-foreseeable consequences of your actions can be presumed to be intentional, then promoting womens' education among a population counts as genocide.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
You're not wrong in general, though I think the steelman goes something like: the overrepresentation is not just in excess of what you'd expect given equal IQs between groups; it also goes beyond what you'd expect given the actual measured IQ differences between the groups.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
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.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
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
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
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.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
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]
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.
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