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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

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 06 09:47:09 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 836


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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	 Hot Bump Bottom New Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Don't even go there: NIH blocks access to genetics database
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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]


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


(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...


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As a practical matter, if you are going to participate in discussion in what is still essentially the free-floating descendant of the comments section of Scott Alexander's blog, it is probably worth being familiar with the classics just to be up to speed with what people are talking about. But in this particular context, (a) I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup is a fun read, and (b) it talks about exactly the sort of way in which what beer you drink can be a class or "tribe" marker.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If it's obvious and simplistic, do you concede the point about it being possible for a beer to be a class marker? Because your denial of that was upstream of this whole exchange.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It is not reasonable to assume gay men are more likely to sexually harass straight men than that straight men are likely to sexually harass each other.




This strikes me as prima facie so implausible that I am genuinely curious what your basis is for believing it. You are claiming that men who are not sexually attracted to other men are more likely to give them unwanted sexual attention than men who are sexually attracted to other men? Perhaps you meant on a raw numbers level, there are more male-on-male sexual assaults committed by straight men than gay men, which is plausible given how many more straight than gay men there are. But as a proportion relative to population, why on earth would we expect men who are sexually interested in X to be less likely to aggressively angle for sexual contact with X than men who are not sexually interested in X? It would be like expecting gay men to be more likely than straight men to sexually assault women.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


seaponies




Oh come on. 'Kelpie' was already a perfectly cromulent word.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The premise of BLM is not that what happened to George Floyd was a personal tragedy for him but a rare, highly-unrepresentative stroke of bad luck, requiring a calm local investigation into what went wrong. The premise of BLM is that cops are routinely targetting black men for death, requiring nationwide [protesting/rioting and arson] to persuade the authorities to rein in the police violence ... and, implicitly, that the racial disparity in rates of deaths-by-cop cannot be accounted for by a comparable disparity in the rates of the kind of behavior that tends to draw the potentially-lethal attention of the cops.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You have people who are 130Iq on this site arguing that the US going from 100IQ to 95IQ is a CATASTROPHE. But what about the gap between 100 and 130?




To be fair, if there were a country with an average IQ of 130, for them it would be a catastrophe to be reduced to an average of 100. It's possible that, for a fixed percentage of 130 IQ people a country might have (assuming it's a low percentage), having a population average of 100 is still going to get you a significantly better standard of living than a population average of 95, even if the gap between 100 and 130 is much larger.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 2, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


BIPOC




... pointedly doesn't lump together all the non-white people. 'Black and Indigenous People of Color' (where 'indigenous' can be taken to include people with a substantial Native American ancestry component, thus sweeping up most Latinos who aren't Conquistador-Americans) excludes Asians of both the South Asian and the East Asian persuasion. It's implicitly a catch-all term for 'non-white people who have worse average social outcomes than white people', a PC alternative for what used to be called 'non-Asian minorities'.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Why Is Legacy Media Like This?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, suit yourself, but the point that a beer absolutely can be a class marker still stands. The relevant part of the SSC post:




The people who are actually into this sort of thing sketch out a bunch of speculative tribes and subtribes, but to make it easier, let me stick with two and a half.






The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.






The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.






(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)






I think these “tribes” will turn out to be even stronger categories than politics. Harvard might skew 80-20 in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans, 90-10 in terms of liberals vs. conservatives, but maybe 99-1 in terms of Blues vs. Reds.






It’s the many, many differences between these tribes that explain the strength of the filter bubble – which have I mentioned segregates people at a strength of 1/10^45? Even in something as seemingly politically uncharged as going to California Pizza Kitchen or Sushi House for dinner, I’m restricting myself to the set of people who like cute artisanal pizzas or sophsticated foreign foods, which are classically Blue Tribe characteristics.