TitaniumButterfly
No bio...
User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
6d ago
You call it slavery, I call it animal husbandry. It worked just fine and while cruelty to animals sucks, domestication is not evil. Often it's a pretty great deal for the animals. Nature is harsh and wild animals are generally worse to each other than their human masters.
My ancestors are at fault inasmuch as they failed to adequately anticipate the fatal flaw in voting-based government, which is the incentive to expand the franchise to those who should never have had it in exchange for political support and dominance over the responsible opponents who refuse to stoop so low.
TitaniumButterfly
27d ago
in many SF settings, the vat-grown stuff is considered inferior
It would have to be, or else people wouldn't be growing it the traditional way any more. I suppose there could be a pure status signaling element but most people aren't going to care enough to sustain that at scale.
TitaniumButterfly
27d ago
For that matter, if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.
Off the top of my head I can think of several things that were worse but ended up being mandated by the government. It's not hard to imagine this happening with lab-grown meat.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
Just in case no one gets around to schooling you, I'd like to register that this is because your attitude is as cringeworthy as it is off-putting and most of us have learned not to bother trying to reason with someone talking the way you are now.
Yes, I think you're generally correct to flag me here as 'just being honest' isn't a great excuse for being so transgressive, though most of the rest of what you wrote doesn't apply in this case I think. This isn't an instance of me wanting to say mean things about a group.
Nor is my issue with 'black people' so much as... look, I'm having sincere trouble finding terminology that gets the idea across without being legitimately interpreted as 'antagonistic'. There's a continuum problem. "Human" is a fuzzy category and largely in the eye of the beholder. Is a gorilla which speaks sign language human? What about Lucy (A. afarensis)? Primitive Tanzanians who discovered fire, then lost the secret and apparently reverted to the lifestyle of other hominids generally not recognized as human?
Skin color is not especially interesting to me. But I agree that the language about human/non-human is inflammatory and doesn't really get the point across, so I'll try to refrain from it in the future. My sincere apologies.
There is a quality which is something along the lines of 'capacity for moral responsibility' that generally (but not perfectly) correlates with IQ and which I think is localized entirely within select groups of ancestries and almost entirely men. These embody and sustain priceless phenomena ranging from how they experience and perceive the world to cultural inheritances. This heritage is inestimably valuable, fragile, and, increasingly, endangered.
My take on 'humans' outside of those groups is that they're something more like children than like non-humans. The trouble, of course, is that they generally don't have the capacity to grow into members of those groups. So they're something else, a third category between children and animals. Something more like permanently disabled children which are helpful dependents at best and, if they get strong and numerous enough, serious existential threats to the system and individuals within it. Their existences are often improved by domestication (honest question: is that word okay? I feel like it's exactly the one I want, no shade) and in the process they can participate in the grand project and enjoy in many of its fruits.
Meanwhile, inability to see this picture clearly or even discuss it intelligibly is one of the greatest threats to the Good and I'm at great pains to figure out how to articulate it.
So that's the perspective, more or less.
TitaniumButterfly
27d ago
Penguin steaks would be a terrible idea (don't ask me how I know) but I think you're on to something overall.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
South Africa made the same mistake because the continued dominance of Europeans over the black and brown masses seemed as obvious as day and night to everyone at the time.
I'm still trying to figure out what changed.
TitaniumButterfly
27d ago
It doesn't really make sense to say that the government banned something so that the government wouldn't mandate it.
Makes perfect sense to me. It's not like 'the government' is a person with a coherent agenda. Governments do things all the time with the intention of constraining their future iterations.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
I'm short on time so this is more of a low-effort drive by than I'd like but:
A perpetual irritation to me is how so many people, even in spaces like this, think "HBD" means "IQ differences" while missing the much bigger, much more interesting picture.
Traits such as aggression, impulse control, parental investment, fidelity, industriousness, cleanliness, punctuality, aesthetic preferences, and innumerably more are all present in animal species, vary among subspecies, and are clearly genetic in origin -- especially in species without culture to speak of. Can different branches of humanity, having been split off for hundreds if not thousands of generations, which evolved in very different environments (and very different cultures), and admixed with separate strains of alt-hominids (neanderthals, florensis, etc.) possibly not have some substantial drift here?
Just the last few hundred years alone have had enormous amounts of different selection pressures on different populations.
When I think of HBD, IQ is one of the least-glaring things that stands out to me. There are smart and dumb people in any group, though yes the average and the tails certainly do matter. But the character of a people is also heavily genetic. The societal conditions which will allow them to flourish (or keep them in miserable persistence at best) vary widely. Even if there were no average IQ difference, we are not built to flourish with each other. Attempts to do so only result in sinking to the lowest common denominator and generally curtailing the highest potentials of all groups in the case of xenophilic multiculturalism, or all groups but the dominant one in most historic human societies.
Not that you're necessarily making this mistake, but OP didn't mention IQ and I think it's tragically myopic to think of IQ first when considering HBD. It just happens to be one of the easiest things to measure.
TitaniumButterfly
14d ago
We might further ask: why can't states do this? The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value. The issue at the heart of raising fertility by having women work less is that society will be poorer, which people are generally opposed to.
If you take a plot of land with a healthy ecosystem and burn it all down, you'll create farmland that is incredibly productive for a few cycles, after which it becomes a barren wasteland in which nothing can grow.
Feminism is civilizational slash-and-burn.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Anyway, the New Testament does speak against racial divisions.
I am not so sure about this, except in very abstract and non-practical senses. Would you care to say more?
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
You'll need enormous amounts of transmission capacity to take solar electricity from California over the mountains to the East Coast or down from Northern Canada.
Surely something like Texas would make more sense than California here? There's a lot of empty land in the South.
Response to the conversation you've been having here in general since I couldn't decide on a single sub-reply to answer:
It's only a strawman if I'm mischaracterizing someone's position. My criticism only applies to those whose position matches my description of "insists on a low-resolution filter when it has no conceivable benefits". If their position is different from what I have described, then clearly my criticism would not apply to them.
This seems to be your main criticism, so it's an important one. I'm going to #include all of the prior responses to your top-level as context, so I'm assuming you can relate to the concept of 'regression to the mean' as something like 'measurement error'. An IQ test can tell us that a person is smart but not that their children will be. This is true and you seem to understand it. But it's also the case that there's a substantial amount of noise in IQ testing and an IQ test can tell us someone is above a certain threshold when they actually aren't, a 'false positive', in which case their children almost certainly won't be.
So with this in mind, an analogy:
You're in charge of purchasing nails for a massive new construction project. Millions of nails are required and they need to meet certain standards or else the structure collapses. The engineers factor in some redundancy and allow that some duds are okay, but no one's sure how many, exactly, so it's important that you be very careful.
Available to you are two brands, A and B. Both nail companies, A and B, produce some good nails and some defective ones.
Brand A is a domestic producer. It's been in business for a long time and turned out a pretty consistent product. In fact, it's been such a mainstay that the assumptions the engineers are working with are based on using these nails. About 10% are defective, but this is understood and historically structures built along these lines and with these nails stand up just fine.
Brand B is a foreign producer with shoddier craftsmanship. Neither the materials nor the manufacturing process are as high-quality. 90% of their nails fail to meet your standards, but 10% do! And they're cheaper, too.
Now, on the face of it you'd be insane to even entertain the idea of buying any nails from brand B. However, due to internal politics, there's strong pressure from the executives to maintain the fiction that all brands are of identical quality. Maybe many of them 'happen' to be major shareholders in Brand B. And it turns out that there's a way to test the nails, individually, and it's so fast and cheap that there's no reason at all not to test every single one. So you turn to your co-worker and say, "Look, there's a lot of pressure to buy from Brand B, and we can test the nails, so why not just do that?"
This is actually kind of a weird thing for you to argue about on the face of it, because the execs have made it clear they won't approve any testing in the first place. (Again one can't help but wonder at their motivations). But your co-worker additionally expresses reluctance because of one more consideration: testing error. 10% of the time, for whatever reason, the nail test returns a positive (desirable) result regardless of whether the nail is good or not. 90% accuracy is still pretty good, you argue, but he's not so sure.
He points out that if you apply that test to Brand A's nails, 99% of the nails used will meet the standards. But if you apply the test to Brand B's nails, almost half of the nails used will be garbage. Can the structure withstand that? Who can say? Oh and by the way both of you and everyone you care about is going to live in it and if it collapses all is lost.
The correct thing to do here isn't to treat both brands as a priori equal and go based on test results. The correct thing to do here is to start with Brand A and then apply the test on top of that. What non-political justification could you possibly even have to screw around with Brand B in the first place?
As such I think you should drop this criticism.
If you find someone saying "We should buy from Brand A and not bother testing", the criticism would be a bit more valid, but at least they've got historical performance on their side, which is worth something.
EDIT: P.S. the end of the story is the executives insist that you buy mainly from Brand B without any testing, the structure begins to list badly, the executives fly off to their villas elsewhere, and everything you value is destroyed. Possibly you could move to another company before that happens but it seems that somehow they're all making the exact same mistake.
TitaniumButterfly
6d ago
Humans aren't animals.
I know you know you're arguing by defining things in a way I wouldn't agree with, so what's the point?
I do not believe Abolitionism won because its supporters expected to reap new voters. All evidence I've seen indicates that it won because its supporters considered chattel slavery an intolerable evil, and were willing to make considerable sacrifices to eradicate it.
That was the popular justification, yes, and for the same reason that people become vegetarians or vegans or join PETA and try to ban pet ownership: we're incredibly prone to anthropomorphizing animals.
The power politics behind the war were rather different. Regardless, my point has less to do with why the war was fought and more to do with what happened afterward. "Send them back to their native habitat" was a great idea with plenty of support and should have happened, though FWIW I think we owed it to them to administrate for their sakes. Whatever they are, they're close enough to us that I don't like the thought of leaving them to their own wretched devices. Perhaps in time, and with guidance...
But even people who cared very much for them often understood that treating them as equals, let alone giving them the franchise, would be insane. But it happened. So with women &c.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
This would at least make me reluctant to adopt any explicitly or intentionally racist policies.
The trouble is that 'racist' is such an overloaded operator that it's perhaps worse than useless at this point.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Galatians 3,
there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus
Yeah, I have a hard time reading that as a statement about how there are actually no differences between these groups when it includes 'male and female' and the author (Paul) has no trouble delineating different roles and expectations for each of those based upon their intrinsic qualities and distinct purposes.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
There was a good motte post awhile back about the ancient Mesopotamian origin myth of women luring wild men playing in the mountains down into the cities to farm.
Link by any chance? I would like to know more.
TitaniumButterfly
5d ago
So look my response here (the one I'm writing at the moment) is not intended as a petulant argument, but I feel a bit frustrated and I'm trusting you to interpret it in the spirit in which I mean it, and thanks in advance for taking the time.
First things first, I appreciate the ethos you're laying out here. As I understand it, this space functions based upon an axiom that anyone should be able to participate in good faith without having to suffer what amount to unnecessary indications of being unwelcome. If someone is of the opinion that entire classes of people are fundamentally incapable of participating in valid ways, that's a problem, because The Motte takes as axiomatic that people of all classes should be welcome to participate as they're able and those who disagree damage the capacity of the site to fulfill that function.
I think this is basically good and right. Not for reasons of niceness, but for reasons of epistemic humility, as you say. It's all too easy for any of us to be flatly wrong about something if for no other reason than because we've simply never encountered someone who could have corrected us if we'd bothered to discuss the matter with them. And, particularly when it comes to evaluating such matters as the one under discussion at the moment (to what degree long-divergent ancestral groups should be considered as belonging in the same class), it's intuitively very important that those of the ancestral groups in question have as much of a chance at participation as possible in order to maximize the chances of this happening.
So far, so good.
"Blacks are animals" - not okay.
Arguendo that was my position (it wasn't; see below), how about "I think blacks are animals"? It's a useful test case because we get to the heart of whether the issue is with the opinion or the phrasing. Though FWIW, again, I think the term 'animals' here was a poor choice which generates vastly more heat than light, at least without defining it in detail and in ways that would probably trigger a lot of disagreement per se.
It's about... at least pretending that you believe those people are people who have a right to disagree with you.
I just don't think I ran afoul of this, is the thing. If I say that I don't think eight year olds (and those who are mentally at that level regardless of their adult bodies) generally don't have the capacity to function as responsible adults, I doubt anyone would react with horror and disgust, and I also think the difference is entirely political. Similar opinions about women and, er, genetically-less-mentally-developed ancestral groups were nothing if not mainstream and considered prima facie obvious not too long ago and for most of human history.
Yeah, saying that is gonna upset some eight year olds, who are a lot less likely to participate precisely because they are juvenile and react accordingly. And I'll even allow that somewhere out there are a few who would make better citizens than many existing citizens. But it would be crazy to object to the observation on those grounds. And the "I think" in the claim is qualifier enough, in my opinion, or in the case of my OP, "I call it". Hedging my statements like that is a practice I picked up here, actually, for exactly the reason that signaling epistemic humility by doing so is useful for the tone of the space and even as a little reminder to myself. I've gotten lazy about it, so again, I concede that you had grounds for correcting me.
If you said the first thing - "I question whether blacks are capable of building a fully functional civilization on their own" - a black poster here, assuming they were willing to engage, has something to engage with. They can disagree with your premise, they can offer counter-evidence, they can ask you why you think that...
All good and well.
But what is a black person supposed to say to "You're an animal"?
They can disagree with my premise, they can offer counter-evidence, they can ask me why I think that...
In short, they can behave exactly as I'd expect myself to behave. Or, if they can't, well?
Finally, and I realize this is likely to come off as splitting hairs but I wasn't talking about 'black people', and frankly I sincerely doubt that any of the people I was talking about would ever show up here in the first place for the same reason that eight year olds don't. (Perfectly-lovely and intelligent black people do show up here from time to time and I consider a couple of them friends and hang out in other spaces and even occasionally go to one for advice on medical issues.) I'm talking about comparatively-genetically-mentally-incapable people. In this particular case, heavy overlap with black, yes. But slavery is not a uniquely black issue and neither is being what amounts to a feral savage who will behave as such regardless of attempts at forcible civilization. In any event there's enough admixture at this point that blanket statements about SSH-descended inhabitants of the US are a lot less appropriate than they were two hundred years ago.
So -- I guess I just want to get the above off my chest. This isn't really an objection to anything you said in particular, I again acknowledge your correction, and (hopefully obviously) I don't intend any kind of gotcha argument. It's just a difficult situation. I'm glad to be in a place where we're at least trying to navigate such a thicket together in good faith.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Respectfully, in this analogy, given the stakes and uncertainties involved, I don't think there's ever any justification for bothering with the inferior pool in the first place.
Of course, people aren't nails. So let's abandon the analogy.
At times it can make sense to import specific individuals - not classes of them - who have demonstrated utility, distinguished themselves, and so on. The bet being made here is that even if his kids are all rotten the good this specific person will do in this generation probably outweighs the future harm of his progeny. And instead you might get lucky and get a lot out of his kids, too!
The risk is greatly increased by a welfare state, of course. If his offspring are so economically unsuccessful that they can't afford to reproduce much or at all, the problem solves itself, which is how so many historical states managed nearly-unrestricted immigration. Come, contribute, succeed -- or read the writing on the wall and try elsewhere!
But the question I wonder about, and which I would very much like to be able to put a number on, is what percentage of a population can be non-conforming immigrants before institutions break down. I don't have an answer there and don't even feel really comfortable guessing. Different institutions have different capacities for this sort of thing, the collapse of one can snowball into others, and so on. The matter is playing with fire by its very nature.
By the way I'm the person you've been discussing this with on discord -- no intent to mislead you about that, in case you hadn't noticed. This seemed the better forum for this format of discussion.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Yes, but culture is downstream of genetics. I want to distinguish here between 'culture' and 'incentives' (especially negative incentives) because you can easily get anyone to behave by hitting them enough times.
With that out of the picture, people can only thrive in a culture to the degree that their genetics allow them to. Put another way, genetics is like a foundation and culture is like the house built on it. People who are not suited to the culture will chafe under it and do worse in it and generally fail to participate in the way that those suitable would.
Over time and with selection pressure, this works out because those capable of conforming do, and reproduce, and those incapable of conforming 'drop out' and fail to reproduce.
Alternatively, the culture shifts (generally degrades) to accommodate those less-suited.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
IQ correlates with both wealth and attractiveness. IIRC on average each 'point' on the 1-10 attractiveness scale is worth something like 3 IQ points. But I have not been able to find that study ever again.
The person to whom I was responding was being intentionally inflammatory while also making it clear that he is not interested in having an open discussion. How then am I to respond? I could overlook his derision (directed at me and mine) and try to explain something to him, except that he's also indicated that he won't consider what I have to say.
Meanwhile, I don't want him to confuse people refusing to cast pearls before swine with his opponents declining to respond out of fear.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
There are lots of genes associated with certain geographic regions and cultures, there aren't genes particularly associated with liking Star Wars.
Only because they haven't been selected for. If anything- but I digress.
We should expect to see alleles associated with, among other things, industriousness, parental investment, general levels of aggression, punctuality, cognitive ability, sexual fidelity, impulse control, and many other things which have been selected for. I also contend that at some point we'll figure out the alleles for all sorts of various aesthetic preferences, and even preferences for narrative tropes. At which point it will indeed be possible to score someone's propensity to enjoy Star Wars. Although, the franchise is a mixed enough basket by now that it'd be fairly messy. After all, most people prefer some Star Wars to other Star Wars.
TitaniumButterfly
3mo ago
For a variety of reasons I find it to be extremely unlikely and just too plain viscerally disgusting for legalized pedophelia or beastiality to ever be digested by society at large.
This seems odd to me given the plentiful historical precedent for both.
There were a lot of metaphorical guardrails I had taken for granted that were totally banking on people being constrained by 'reasonable' but unspecified assumptions about the human condition. I think those boundaries have already been crossed several times in my mind, which then in turns leads me to believe those boundaries didn't actually exist outside of social conformity and enforcement.
As an Orthodox Christian, it's nice to see someone notice instead of doubling down on the madness.
A question I'd like to ask more people (if it were even remotely socially acceptable) is, "Why do you imagine anyone finds zoophilia odd?" Or leaving infants to die of exposure, or slavery, or any number of other things.
They weren't a problem when they were slaves. Your ancestors fighting to free them are why we're in this mess.
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