If instead you hold everyone to the same standard, then even if fewer black people get through, the ones who do will actually gain full values from their degree. Which, especially if culture is the dominant factor, creates a gateway to success for black people who want to escape that culture and become successful. But even if genes predominate, this still enables a way for above-average intelligence black people to distinguish themselves from the average.
I see no way in which the benefit to fewer degree holders will overcome the total wreckage for everyone else.
If the anti-hereditarians are right, I see far less reason to not provide AA since we know class-based AA will disadvantage blacks. If we can't blame genes we will have to look at things like where blacks live, which may or may not be blamed on racism. But, even putting that aside, if blacks won't inherently revert to the mean as HBDers claim, if the "dumb" AA students are only merely disadvantaged by living with the wrong people (as opposed to being promoted to schools well past their competence) why not take them? You're going to miss out on the chance to give the future leaders of the community even more cachet so they can shape the community? In the name of...changing the norms of the community?
Like, I don't think Obama has caused a major change in norms but it's probably better to have had him and men like him than not. By his wife's own account people like her might not have made it without AA.
If Hanania and Murray are right there's also almost no way getting rid of AA is better for black people.
I'll use Murray, since he gives us clear numbers on what he thinks happens at the top scores in Facing Reality:
The College Board declined my request for the data that would give me the precise numbers, but the published breakdowns allow for reasonably accurate estimates of how many students of each race get 1500 or higher on the SAT.1 The numbers of test takers with a combined verbal and math score of 1500+ were around 900 for Africans and around 3,300 for Latins. Meanwhile, the numbers for Europeans and Asians with scores in that range were about 27,500 and 20,000 respectively.
900 & 3,300...to 27,000. There is no set of hidden benefits to disadvantaging everyone apart from this population that'll make it worth it for the losers.
If you want to do as Murray does and argue for meritocracy or a politics of difference, okay. But it just isn't one of those "rising tide" situations. Someone has to lose in a meritocracy. Allegedly entire categories of "someones", sometimes.
Yes, John McWhorter and Neil DeGrasse Tyson will lose that asterisk - but they seem to have shed it on their own anyway. But plenty of black people will never get a shot at all at that level. Yes, as it stands now there's some drag on Harvard's credibility and the credibility of black AA beneficiaries. But, as I said, most people are normies and either don't know the details of AA or know better than to say and Harvard is clearly maintaining enough of its prestige for them to get benefits.
You're also leaving out the problem that feminists run into: women's revealed preference is to work less, let's say we had a legal situation that allowed most women to do so. It would create its own negative stereotype. You're worried about the stereotype that McWhorters have to swim against, but you forget the much older prejudice of "yeah, he made it through X but maybe he slipped through the cracks. I'd prefer a white. "
There's almost no way a wipeout better from the African-American perspective than the current messy system that at least incentivizes Harvard to find some ADOS blacks (even if most of them are Nigerians)
I don't agree. I can use MMA as an example: you don't have to fight your opponent's game (in fact, you're given an incentive to exploit the holes in their game), but some amount of actual fighting is not just expected, it's required under the rules (timidity is a sanctionable offense).
Something not being a collaboration doesn't mean that there aren't rules or standards of behavior meant to extract the goods from that endeavor. It was fair to ask Rufo/whoever that question, it's fair for Rufo/whoever to answer and then pull their own uncomfortable question. "Not until you go" is closer to timidity imo.
Otherwise why bother? Just don't deal with Robinson or the concept of debate at all. According to Rufo this has worked very well for the radical leftists he loathes, but isn't that part of why he loathes them?
Huh. I actually share most of those assumptions (my full opinion on HBD is...up in the air). It's more that I just don't share the sense of statistical implausibility. I was just wondering if I just wasn't getting the math.
I guess, ironically, HBDers who gleefully cite things about how overrepresented Jews or whoever are in this or that place has simply deadened my reaction to the idea that some segments of the populace will just do way too well (based on what a layman thinks is "fair"). If you tell me a highly restricted group of the best off people from a billion-strong pool do well enough to seize a couple of thousand spots a year from one of the worst performing ethnic groups in the US...it's hardly the biggest overepresentation they've claimed.
To me, when you combine the intuitions that:
- Black migrants probably have a lower crime rate
- Black migrants probably from better educated families.
- Black migrants are probably likely to be in two parent families.
- If HBDers like Charles Murray are right then there should be a huge shortage of the top-top ADOS students. Of course supplementation would be necessary if you didn't want to drop standards (more).
I find it harder to be shocked.
I would find it more unintuitive if it was across the entire college system.
"Incels" existed in every generation and always have, but they're not really who I'm talking about. There are a lot of more average men who are now falling through the cracks and failing to start, who now often get clumped in with the actual incels
That sounds like a description of modern incels (obviously we don't care that much about the floor of men who'd just never reproduce, we care that the number seems to be growing....)
But let's say we mean some people who haven't totally blackpilled themselves. Sure. It's a more viable demographic. But I wonder to what degree they aren't subject to similar problems like obesity. After all, what did they fail to start? School sports and all those other physical virtues?
She doesn't seem like she has a particularly interesting perspective from what I've seen here
I read her book, and I more or less agree tbh
"It's true that the warning lights are on and weird noises are coming from the engine, but the engine hasn't actually stopped so there's no problem."
No, I think you're thinking of the late USSR or Impeprial China and I'm thinking about a random awful African country.
Like, both have problems. But one collapsed and was replaced by a new, perhaps more viable model. The other just continues to dwell (or spiral) in a low-level equilibrium with no end in sight.
That's how I see it. Bad regimes and systems can persist for a long time without a real counter. When we're talking about some of the richest and most mature democracies with ever increasing government-corporate control of the digital infrastructure and their visible testing of means of curbing revolt (e.g. the attack against the bank accounts of trucker protestors)...
The public is way too divided and been trained to both hate each other and feel fatalist about a lot of this. They've already proven that plenty of them are for authoritarian tactics so long as it's framed correctly.
This is without even getting into more speculative (though unfortunately less speculative every day) uses of autonomous tech to put down prole revolts without even depending on the usual "class traitors" that make up the thin blue line.
We're now seeing reports from school teachers that they have to stage special interventions because boys are sharing Andrew Tate content
The psychological fragility and neuroticism of the average leftist activist or booster doesn't mean the system is won't strike back. Quite the opposite
The system has its problems yes, but it uses panics like Andrew Tate to justify more control.
You point out that they're holding interventions with teenage boys. I'd note that they moved to curtail his influence online and he's literally on trial right now... In the meantime sixty different "experts" are probably calling for increased intervention against "misinformation" and "radicalism" and the social media sites are probably tuning their systems (we now know they have a lot of coordination with the government) to make sure it never happens again.
Why include the "looks" qualifier?
To emphasize the totality and...arbitrariness? A better word is escaping me, but the image that comes to mind is a scared cop shooting anything that moves
Tanista
9mo ago
I think that the current system of relations between the sexes is untenable and producing large numbers of frustrated young men with nothing tying them to society.
True. Luckily for them it's an evolutionarily novel environment and the most frustrated men are basically poisoned by fast food and the internet.
Those men are disappearing into video games and porn and, even if they weren't, simply don't have the psychological and physical profile for rebellion (incels are well overrepresented in traits like depression and low internal locus of control).
There ARE roving bands of men (or close enough) but that just seems to be due to lax law enforcement (and, tbh, I doubt low-IQ criminals are as sexually frustrated. From what I know it's the opposite; they tend to have higher partner counts).
Who? I have no idea who this person is and I can't see any links to her work, so I'm not going to talk about her or her positions at all.
Louise Perry, who has also written a book attacking liberal feminism and the sexual revolution. In my head women like her and Emba are of a class.
Hard disagree - the cathedral is currently in serious disarray and is openly failing in new and exciting ways every single day. There are serious problems with the government of the west as it is currently constituted, and these doctrines and ideas have been spreading through the population like wildfire. Prosocial illusions about femininity have been largely destroyed and women are unhappier than ever, even as male dysfunction finally grows noticeable enough that people are talking about it. The regime absolutely has not won - they have a rapidly failing grip on society that is forced to grow more nakedly authoritarian and less credible as time goes on. If that's what counts as winning, I'm curious as to what defeat looks like.
All of this is true. And yet dissent is not manifesting in any sort of constructive alternative. Young men are unhappy, they either buy into the prog line in some way or dig into a variety of reactionary content creators playing whack-a-mole with the censors. Women are unhappy, they either get increasingly desperate talks on how misogyny is still the problem or maybe they read works like Emba's and Perry's that offer critique but no solution. Anything that even looks vaguely constructive is written off as misogynist or unviable.
It's a form of "feminist realism": complaining about capitalism means nothing if no one can actually conceive of or execute a replacement vision. Socialists can talk all they want about the system being this close to collapse, it clings on.
Tanista
10mo ago
What do people use for sleep tracking? I honestly feel like Fitbit gets worse every product, time to look for alternatives.
Tanista
10mo ago
coup gone wrong. Prig had some supporters he relied on, but they decided to sit this one out, so he got off on the first face-saving stop
The speculation is that it was Surovikin, who Prigozhin was complementary of but quickly came out with a cease and desist video.
Of course, that might be US intelligence trying to get him Rommel'd.
Tanista
11mo ago
As I said there are people who just run around posting disproportionately and being negative. One example is podcast threads: you can have someone jump into a thread that was just posted (well before they could listen to it ) and make snide, low-effort comments about guests or the host (including back-handed comments like "well, at least he had a good guest this time"). Then that's the first thing everyone sees and a significant portion of the discussion is not about the topic but whether the guest is awful or not in some unrelated issue or, even worse, whether the sub is too toxic and so on.
Then there's users who have some grudge with each other and it can drag out across threads and weeks. Nipping it in the bud by simply removing those comments removes the incentives for that pettiness cause no one will ever see it.
I've previously described the psychology of a certain sort of poster that seems determined to ruin a sub and such people just have to be deterred or banned early.
There's also inflammatory off-topic stuff like HBD that has, ime, never went anywhere good. If it doesn't violate the relevance rule then we're stuck with it. But it actually did make life more bearable for everyone to just not discuss it (it seemed to draw the above sort of people like flies). The sub markedly became worse when it actually became relevant and we could no longer remove it.
Tanista
11mo ago
The people chose it' is maybe a slight exaggeration
The exact phrase was "Sweden chose this"
Tanista
11mo ago
Didn't TJ Holmes also lose his job after a similar affair around the same period?
Hm...
Tanista
27d ago
(even though, as of yet, this hasn’t been implemented afaik)
I still don't understand why this is some impossibility. Is it really that huge a technical issue or does British policy just move at a glacial pace?
Not a bad idea...under a Trump presidency. It looks like Biden might lose but it actually hasn't happened yet and he's clearly feeling pressure.
Tanista
2mo ago
Point taken. But, in our defense, iirc part of it was the worry that the writers would feel that way.
and a handful of weirdos in the progressive coalition ranting about how white women shouldn’t have babies
That's the far end of the curve. The more important messaging is education/career uber alles or Chelsea Handler-esque "kids are a distraction from all the cool shit you could be doing (if you're a rich white lady)" (see also , for a less absurd example)
Tanista
3mo ago
Yes, in comparison to established democracies they seem less stable and unlikely to survive as long.
They do. But I'm not inclined to blame that on immigration policy first. Resource-driven monarchies are probably less stable than an old democracy like the UK. But that doesn't mean their level of ethnic tension for their population is well below "simmering on its way to insurrection"
Like most authoritarian governments, they pay the cost to the functioning of the country I mentioned, because they are less responsive to feedback and have to keep things under control in other ways
By "feedback" I assume you mean they're ignoring some economic benefit here, because I doubt the public is calling for more foreign citizenship?
But he was talking about a country that both let in anyone and then disregarded their opinions in favor of democratic rule by the minority of natives.
Yeah, I suppose it would get tense across generations if people are allowed to stay (though in some edge cases I think migrants would be happy to avoid things like conscription). But, if they aren't citizens, the welcoming nation has options if it wants them. Which is why OP is right that it'd probably be vastly more popular. That is the first demographic you have to please after all.
Sure, but policies that we don't like or even consider racist is different from "bigotry, racial hatred, or dehumanizing,"
Both things can be true: the Left could be prone to expanding the definition of racist and "black people are just dumber" is generally seen as racist for a reason.
And yes, I've heard all of the alternate phrasings (X million blacks are smarter than the average white, people as individuals) . It just doesn't play well for a reason. I think there's a general discomfort with "X is (irremediably) stupid", which combines quite well (or badly) with "blacks are less intelligent". People do see worth in intelligence (and success in the market), its absence matters.
People keep saying this, but every time I see the dots actually connected, I notice that the threads held there by sheer force of will rather than any sort of actual underlying connection.
Because, not too long ago, all forms of segregation and dehumanizing talk were justified using these very arguments? Not just "cut welfare that encourages single parent homes" but literally "we can't live around these people because they're prone to degeneracy and violence" (and not always put that politely). This isn't hypothetical, is it?
To me this is like living in post-Christian Rome where exposing babies has been banned for decades and is now taboo. Some people start using the exact same arguments as the exposers used to, but insist nothing that bad will happen this time. In fact, they're offended you'd think they are like those people and annoyed you won't take them at their word that, after you strip fetuses and children of their ensouled status, nothing will change and the status quo that was born out of an explicit rejection of their ideas will continue.
To hear tell, the connections are just paranoiacs connecting dots
And if we're willing to say that this bit of political intuition is a high enough bar to censor HBD
I never said anything about censorship, just that the reaction is not some doeish naivete. Quite the opposite.
TBF he did float (willing...lol) repatriation of Italian-Americans so I don't think it was his first plan so much as his hope. As I said, he was polite.
It was just funny how an American can be pessimistic about so many things except that, the power of US cultural hegemony wielded by his enemies.
Tanista
5mo ago
Pressure works.
Sure, and I don't have any disagreement with the idea of encouraging the good in principle.
But the more of an investment something is, the more it'll determine someone's life, the more pressure it needs. It seems relatively easy to enforce ludicrous norms , but often that's because those norms cost less. People bend because they can easily retreat later on. Not so with kids.
Some people may legitimately just be bad at forecasting what'll make them happy and would benefit from some Caplanesque education, but I think this is a thorny problem for a reason: if people perceive the costs to be too high it's hard to see them being educated out of it without some seriously novel tactics that haven't been tried by the most educated and powerful nations in the world, who have every incentive to fix this problem.
Tanista
6mo ago
I think at least Loki was always planned to be a show. A lot of content was mandated to get Disney+ going as a Netflix competitor. Why not go with Loki, who is one of the second-stringers with a fanbase?
Tanista
7mo ago
meant Forest Whittaker's IA guy?
Ah, that makes more sense. IIRC he was stopped by the "good" people. Whose ineptness led to the finale we got.
Mackey himself...the whole point of the most infamous scene in the show (in the very pilot!) was that he wasn't just another anti-hero cop. Though he tries.
So I tried to read 1632 again and I just...can't bring myself to. But I'm still hankering for some alternate history/ISOT stuff. Does anyone have any good recs? And yes, I've read Stirling's Trope Namer. Hopefully that can't be the best work in the genre and it's all downhill from here.
Maybe not them but their grand-kids?
I think you underestimate how good Americans are at assimilation. They only have to win once, and they usually do.
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