ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
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User ID: 2458
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
5mo ago
Yes, I’d just add that when other people try to give non-vibes reasoning, I see it as vibes with extra steps.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
2mo ago
I think Rubicon is a better example of steelmanning US intelligence capabilities. You're right that we can't really know the full story (at least until more stuff starts getting declassified), but I think the Cold War (for which the relevant facts are less murky) is a big part of why OP and many others have such a pessimistic view of US security. This really deserves a longer post but I'm very tired so I'll summarize:
- the Cold War is understandably viewed as of paramount historical importance to pretty much everyone who cares about spy stuff.
- From an intelligence/security POV the US lost the Cold War.
It may be that CIA and other natsec/intelligence agencies have started performing closer to how they're supposed to in the decades since the CW ended. It's possible that the many visible 21st century failures we hear about are misleading because we only hear about when things go wrong, but I don't believe this applies to the Cold War. Also, what we do know about modern CIA failures is pretty damning.
I would say that it's actually not as bad as it's always been because China isn't as competent as the USSR was, and has many fewer fellow travelers to exploit, a gap which isn't closed by their use of diaspora. I'd be surprised if there were currently Chinese agents in high-up policy making positions of the sort that were exposed by Venona, and you did list some pretty big wins. The point about visibility goes both ways though, it's easier to sweep failures under the rug when you can just classify them.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
3mo ago
This is a cope explanation. Things get declassified, people talk, and the assassination plots we know about are not just the ones that publicly blew up but were dragged up during congressional investigations against the wishes of everyone involved. Not that the CIA is above lying to congressional committees, but I think it's a mistake to assume there are secret CIA assassination operations that are vastly more competent than the ones we know about. If you actually read about this stuff it just doesn't fit, the CIA as an organization simply can't get away with doing that kind of thing anymore, and even when it tried it was bad at it. The closest I can think of to an attempt to disguise the nature of an assassination is the CIA plot to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, wherein they planned to poison his toothpaste with something that would cause a death that looked natural (they never managed to pull it off).
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
8mo ago
You're right. I should have included in my post that I don't think believe it's reasonable to think that black people in crime infested neighborhoods aren't aware that most of the people being victimized live near to and look like them. The poll that was posted seems to support that.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
6mo ago
I really like your point about journalistic standards. Did you come up with it or did some blogger? If it’s the latter let me know so I can follow them.
To add to your critique of the good old days of journalistic standards I’d like to point out that journalism wasn’t necessarily better (although there may have been more high-effort investigative work, I don’t know) so much as it was centralized to the point that heterodoxy was mostly invisible. It’s a common view that journalism was less political and more truth-seeking but I think this is mostly the result of the media being so powerful as to create the political water that discourse took place in. If you read Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent you can see many of the same criticisms that heterodoxers such as frequent this site make today. The journalistic standard of honesty can be stretched very far with some motivated pilpul. Maybe in the 19th century it was different.
Chomsky mentions centralization as one of the main causes of the state of affairs he critiques, and I have to agree. It doesn’t seem that news organizations are capable of being apolitical, in that case why not favor a decentralized media ecosystem wherein no organization has the power to shape the discourse?
The main argument against it I can see is the danger of ignorant plebs being manipulated by demagogues, which might have merit but cedes that capital J Journalism exists to manufacture consent.
The internet might give us the cure to Gell-Mann amnesia. I’m not sure it will actually be better but like many disaffected very-online people I dislike the current roster of media institutions and am happy to see them fail.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
2mo ago
I don't have first-hand spook experience or access to classified information, so it's possible you're right. I also don't know nearly as much about the non-HumInt side of the Cold War, although I will say that non-human intelligence doesn't matter if the humans comprising your organization are talking to the other side. A good example of this is PB/Gold. A Great operation that might have been a huge intelligence victory completely ruined because British intelligence was about as watertight as a shower drain.
The Soviets were good, the West was a more permissive environment, and communist ideology motivated many.
Yes, this is a big reason, it's not just western incompetence. Sort of like the US IC's continual humiliations at the hands of Cuba, countries that aren't liberal democracies have a much easier time doing this kind of thing and the fellow traveler phenomenon was extremely helpful to the Soviets. My point was that western intelligence communities' results were generally worse than their Soviet counterparts, not that the reason for this was solely incompetence.
I mean the USSR is no more, the US and its allies clearly outclassed the Soviets in nearly every arena
I agree with you on nearly every arena, I think intelligence is one arena where the reverse was true. The fact it no longer exists has very little to nothing to do with Western intelligence work imo. Just the penetration at the policy-making level alone is close to dispositive for me, but of course this isn't the kind of question that can be definitively answered.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
2mo ago
Again, it would honestly take a book (Spies by Calder Walton makes the point pretty well although it devolves into ranting about Trump at the end) but I'll summarize.
By what standard?
The level to which the USSR infiltrated the US and its allies was far above the reverse. The Cambridge 5 (who weren't even American although they managed to compromise American intelligence) alone are a more impressive from a HumInt perspective than anything the CIA accomplished during the war (I'll only talk about CIA because british intelligence was laughably compromised). Most of the wins CIA managed were walk-ins caused by the USSR being a shithole, which had nothing to do with the CIA itself, and the balance was still towards the USSR, who had their own walk-ins (usually for money or ideology rather than the desire to defect).
The KGB also penetrated the US policy-making apparatus. Harry Dexter White, who as a Soviet agent may have contributed to the communist victory in China as a treasury official by obstructing financial aid to the Nationalists. Alger Hiss and Lauchlin Currie also come to mind (read about Venona if you're interested in this). The US had no equivalent agents placed to influence Soviet policy. The Soviets also ran the CPUSA.
When the CIA did get close to a win, it was often leaked by one of the many Soviet infiltrators in the CIA or in MI6 whom CIA shared much of their intelligence with. Konstantin Volkov comes to mind.
Overall I think you'd really struggle to make an argument that the US accomplished more of its intelligence goals than the USSR.
According to whom?
I don't think this is controversial among people who study the topic, it may be surprising if you don't though. If you can find someone defending the performance of western intelligence services during the Cold War I'd be interested to read it.
Unfortunately the dissident right doesn't really have realistic political solutions besides the Sam Hyde "just kill em" semi-irony that I can't see ever catching on in the US. Although it's irritating to hear so many bad arguments and poor evidence trotted out to defend progressivism, dealing with multi-ethnic societies is hard. If you don't support mass deportations of citizens or mass murder then you need to advocate for policies that work within a society as multiethnic as the one you're in. Maybe that means racial spoils systems a la Singapore or South Africa.
That being said, I don't think raceblindness is actually as politically untenable as Greene implies. If you poll people, most don't support affirmative action or other racial spoils-type policies. Moreover, I think it needs to be emphasized that there's only one ethnic group driving these politics in the US, and they're quite a small minority (although obviously they have many sympathizers). I don't think abandoning colorblindness just to placate blacks or cut down on race riots necessarily follows, if the truth about group differences that so many liberal elites supposedly know but don't say were publicly acknowledged, imo black advocacy would start to be perceived less like equality or even equity and more as the unmitigated black self-interest that I see it as. If this happened, these policies would become politically untenable, and raceblindness might make a comeback. France has a large ethnic-minority underclass and manages to maintain raceblindness (although obviously it isn't a paradise over there). I think raceblindness can be viable in the US, and if you have ethical or other reasons to prefer it it's not unreasonable to, although obviously in the current political climate it's impossible. People who want raceblindness need to be pointing to how ineffective all the effort and resources poured into closing the achievement gap has been, they need to point out that black underrepresentation isn't because of anti-black racism and that prioritizing diverse candidates means hiring less qualified candidates. These are common talking points online, if they go mainstream it could change politics drastically. As Greene says, these things are already sometimes admitted in private by educated people. These sorts of public taboos can collapse pretty quickly (although they can also persist for a long time).
I quite enjoyed this essay, I think Greene is right about centrist liberals not (publicly) acknowledging the actual consequences of what they're advocating for, and maybe not even being willing to live with those consequences. I think his proposed solutions are pretty undercooked though, if I were his editor I would probably just remove that part of the essay.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
15d ago
Same. The number of intelligent and informed people who believe we're going to be dead in 15 years due to AI is very depressing. Not because I believe it but because I think they're completely deluded and I don't think I'm capable of breaking Yud's grip on their brains.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
7mo ago
I think something like this does actually exist (read about Young Thug's little gangbanger warlord lifestyle if you want an extreme example) but the key thing is money, not that they victimize whites. You see the same thing with athletes, non-gang-affiliated musicians etc. Money confers status, but I don't think that has anything to do with Kulak's point due to money seeming to confer similar status to violent criminals and basketball players. I think property crime would be directed outward more because that's where the money is than because of racial solidarity/animosity.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
5mo ago
You seem to want to say these things are wrong in some objective sense, I don’t. The way you’re arguing this supports my view. You want to say some things are wrong, so you feel the need for an intellectual framework for saying so. Constructing an intellectual edifice so you feel justified in saying what you already believe is just the vibes approach with unnecessary casuistry.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
5mo ago
I'm not 100% sure I know what set of beliefs you're referring to when you talk about rationalist atheists, but it seems completely plausible that the view that certain moral sensibilities are ingrained in (most) people as some sort of pro-social or pro-fitness evolutionary adaption would be under that umbrella. It seems rational to say that morality is based on vibes much more than logic, and the many attempts at applying logic to it can only be justified if you subscribe to the intellectual equivalent of the labor theory of value.
If you mean someone who believes morality should be a logical system that only presumes doing harm or causing suffering or whatever is evil, then I can see your point. I think the "in our society it's harmful" argument fits that framework, although of course that leaves open the possibility of it being ok in other societies.
Both the evolutionary and the milieu arguments are rational (as I understand the term) justifications for the daughter rape prohibition, they just don't rely on a from-first-principles approach to morality, which IMO is a good thing since such approaches are very stupid.
Sorry if this came off as a defensive rationalist atheist screed, I don't identify as a rationalist and have many issues with the movement. I just don't think it's fair to say that they can't defend a position that they largely don't hold. The rationalist position as I understand it is that there is no problem of morals, morality is subjective and it's largely pointless to debate it or point out inconsistencies in what the public feels icky about. That's also my position, so maybe I'm just projecting and your criticisms are valid.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
8mo ago
My bad, I'll edit it.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
2mo ago
There are many people who disagree with HBD. It's such a niche and taboo view that I'm not sure how any proponent could get upset by disagreement. It's hard to see anything but disagreement. The reason I'm grimacing is that your reasoning is extremely bad and the way you use words like correlation (which comes up a lot in this debate because of how much evidence is statistical) is sloppy to say the least.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
2mo ago
I was referring to the political affirmative action, but you're right in that it's nowhere near S. Africa and probably is less "spoils"-y than the US in some ways. I think you understate it though, they literally only allowed Malay candidates to run for president in 2017. Most in the US would balk at that sort of blatant ethnic discrimination, which is why we have memes like "one of many factors".
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
2mo ago
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000e-2 under (k) as Nybbler said.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
2mo ago
It would never be conclusive. Countries are not electrons, you can't just compare them to each other and expect it to be perfectly valid.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
3mo ago
The idea that the CIA or some other western service killed him is ridiculous. Carrying out something that risky just to make Putin look bad when he's already a global pariah makes no sense, likewise for the GRU although it's slightly less ridiculous (but still not realistic). Also the CIA is notoriously bad at carrying out assassinations, even pre-Church commission. If it wasn't a drone strike and their involvement is alleged to be more than supplying intel/weapons I'd be very skeptical of their involvement in any assassination.
Generally if the motive you're considering for an intelligence service to kill someone is a false flag to manipulate public opinion you're completely on the wrong track. The only time I can ever think of something remotely similar being confirmed to have happened is the Lavon affair conspiracy which was never carried out. The vast majority of the time assassinations occur it's because the regime sees the target as an enemy or annoyance and wants them to stop existing.
One thing Kulak implied that is simply untrue is that criminals in the black community are tolerated/supported because they victimize whites. While black on white crime is certainly higher than the reverse, it isn't high compared to black on black crime. Most crime is intraracial, and the burden of black violence falls predominantly on blacks themselves. I broadly agree with him on crime but on this he's completely wrong as can easily seen from homicide statistics: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
2mo ago
I'm skeptical that whatever it is that IQ tests are testing for correlates directly with "intelligence".
The charitable reading of this statement is that you're skeptical IQ tests perfectly measure what you consider intelligence. I don't think anyone would say that IQ tests are perfect and always a perfect reflection of someone's cognitive ability, but when you test large groups of people, which is the data that we're actually talking about when we talk about IQ in the HBD context, these individual-level objections don't apply. If you think there are factors beyond what an IQ test measures that matter for life outcomes then no one will disagree with you, but your skepticism of this point is sort of a nonsensical reason to be anti-HBD since since racial gaps exist on every standardized test that could reasonably called cognitive in existence, including job-specific tests like fire chief qualification exams. Also, IQ does correlate pretty well with positive life outcomes, so even if it's one of many factors (just like race in college admissions) it seems to be a pretty important factor.
That being the case, your position of basically denying there's a cognitive ability or "merit" gap (as in the people who would be hired meritocratically into cognitively demanding jobs) is untenable even if you think IQ is complete nonsense. Anti-HBDers who have any idea what they're talking about don't deny the achievement gap, they argue the causes are non-significantly genetic. Also, "correlates directly" is simply not a statistically literate thing to say.
I'm skeptical that "intelligence" correlates directly with individual virtue, honesty, conscientiousness, lack of criminality, leadership ability, etc...
I think it probably does (although again, the phrase "correlates directly" makes me grimace), but even if it didn't, I'm not sure what the relevance is. If IQ and other positive qualities were completely uncorrelated, we would still expect racial gaps in anything cognitively demanding. This is an argument against viewing higher IQ people as inherently better people, not for IQ or other measures of cognitive ability being useless metrics, even though the latter is the way you're trying to use it.
I am also skeptical of the claim that any and all observed variations in the above can be explained purely through biology/genetics.
"purely genetics" is doing all the work here. If, say, 70% of the gap is genetic, HBDers are right. likewise with "any and all variation". Why are you committed to the achievement gap being 100% XOR 0% genetic? Also, could you commit to whether you think the achievement gap is real or not? By this I'm asking whether you think the ubiquitous racial gaps on standardized tests imply an actual difference in the desirable traits being measured like future job performance, achievement in school, and, admittedly more nebulous, cognitive ability.
Subsequently I'm skeptical of the claim that if meaningful biological differences between groups exist, that the effect size of these differences outweigh the effect sizes of individual variance and/or other cultural and economic factors.
This is a dumber version of Lewtonin's fallacy. When we talk about entire population groups, individual variance doesn't "outweigh" population-level effects, that's nonsensical. If you're saying that HBD being true doesn't preclude the existence of smart black people then yeah, obviously.
The cultural/economic factors part is closer to a sort-of defensible position (although I'd like to see you explain racial SAT scores separated by parental income and education level) but you ruin your own point by using the word "meaningful" before them. If meaningful biological differences between groups (that impact traits we care about) exist, HBD is correct!
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
3mo ago
To think progressives are deliberately promoting HBD because they're old-South style racists playing 11-d chess is actually impressively deranged.
While there is certainly an element of this, it heavily depends on where the trial is held. Progressives and blacks have their biases and will be much more lenient towards black on white crime than vice versa, so in San Francisco a "sickle-cell crisis" can be used as an excuse for murder. The reverse biases do exist, I'm sure there are towns in the US where whites are advantaged by the local judges, police, and jury pool, and the "gay panic" excuse for murder would be accepted. The point is that neither are universal at the criminal justice level, because criminal justice is mostly a local system.
The main issue as I see it is that the interests of one tribe are disproportionately advanced by the federal government. Local group bias in either direction is unavoidable, but the federal government seems to fall quite firmly on one pole of the bias. SCOTUS obviously contradicting the letter of the law forbidding discrimination based on race to allow discrimination beneficial to blacks is probably the most flagrant example, but there are many others. I agree with Richard Hanania that this general pro-black and pro-"protected group" bias on the part of the federal government falls under the umbrella of civil-rights law, and that much of the cultural down-stream effects we see today such as "wokeness" and progressive insanity in San Francisco criminal justice are largely a consequence of these laws and how they're enforced.
Cherry-picked examples of terrible jury and prosecutorial decisions relating to street-crimes are the lowest-level example, both causally and intellectually, of the wider trend in America of the federal government protecting some groups more than others. All of this is to say that yes, blacks are certainly privileged in the courts of some parts of the country, but imo that will always be true under any reasonable local or national policy. The issue that should be addressed, and that charitably I'll assume he's trying to address rather than just riling up his readers, is the bias on the part of the institutions that are supposed to be universal. It's axiomatic to me that institutions serving and governing everyone should be objective in the race-blind sense, but they aren't and many people don't even seem to think they should be. I don't think Greer's argument well supports his conclusion that blacks receive legal preferential treatment in this country, although I agree with that conclusion at least on the federal level.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
1mo ago
60 minutes recently released a big investigation on Havana Syndrome basically saying that the cause is real attacks by Russian intelligence agents and not some sort of psychosocial mass hallucination (which many have believed since these incidents first began to occur). They identify specific Russian agents and link their movements to occurrences of Havana Syndrome aka AHIs (anomalous health incidents). As someone who was unsure about what was going on here this seems pretty convincing: Russians have been using some sort of weapon to target US intelligence personnel.
The culture war angle to this is twofold. First, the US IC has seemed unsure whether these AHIs (which usually take the form of some sort of brain injury) were the result of Russian attacks. If this article is legit then these reporters managed to do a better job than the people we pay and give access to classified information to so that they can find out exactly these sorts of things. This is an enormous failure on the part of US intelligence services, its agents have been getting attacked, many have been forced to medically retire, and the organizations they belong to haven't even been able to determine whether an attack happened at all. To be fair, some organizations seem to have said these were likely attacks, others have said the opposite, so not every organization failed to the same extent in this respect.
The other culture war angle is that if this article is true, Russia has been attacking members of the US intelligence community for a decade. What will be the retaliation for this? US relations with Russia are already pretty bad, but this is quite a big provocation. Russia occupies a spot in the US culture war, I wonder if this will change that position very much. Is Putin still strong and trad? Can he get more reviled by the people who hate him? Most people seem uninterested in/uninformed about spy stuff so maybe this won't really register in the public consciousness.
This isn't as culture-war-y a topic as some, but I think it's interesting.
ZRslashRIFLE
Lambency Studies Scholar👨‍🎓
3mo ago
Sure, the far-right doesn't currently have *power, but it certainly has influence. And most of the far-right does mix in the 'statistical differences in IQ' part of HBD with white identitarianism.
I think the right-wing Overton window is already shifting in the HBD direction, partly because Musk bought twitter and allowed it to be discussed. In real life though, it's still absolutely unthinkable and career suicide to talk about it frankly. I take your point though, the idea does actually have (increasing) power just because of it's popularity on twitter. Maybe we'll see that translate into real life in the next decade.
It's a fact that obviously helps the right more than the left because it torpedoes a core left-wing belief about the world, but in the end it's just a fact, like evolution, that can be used to justify whatever policies the arguer wants. LKY seems to have instituted affirmative action in Singapore partly because of his race realist beliefs. I think it's really asinine to assign facts a political significance in and of themselves, even if it happens that currently one political faction likes talking about it more than another. It's not hard to argue for largely the same things leftists are arguing for now while being race realist, but I think discourse and policy would be less dysfunctional were leftists forced to do so instead of making magic dirt arguments.
His point is sort of that 'not-HBD' is a key part of the logic justifying affirmative action, but not actually a key part of the political resonance of affirmative action for almost everyone.
I agree this is his point but I disagree with him. I think a drastic shift in the Overton is possible simply by popularizing knowledge of HBD-related facts. I think many people are genuinely unaware even of the achievement gap, let alone the evidence for it being largely genetic. The NYT runs an article about selective highschools having an issue with diversity every couple of years, not sure how that would even be news unless people weren't aware of the achievement gap. In my interactions with people I don't reveal my actual views so maybe they don't either, but I get the impression most people are simply unaware of the kind of stuff you see on race realist twitter. If that's really the case, I think there's a strong case that talking about it can change peoples' minds.
I also really dislike the argument that because wignats like talking about it no one else should lest they be associated with wignats. Politics is primarily about preferences but facts are actually important as well. Yglesias has a relevant piece on this https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-strange-death-of-education-reform-3f5 wherein he pretty much says that denying the achievement gap exists is stupid and harmful. I think a similar argument can easily be made from a liberal perspective for not denying that the gap is significantly genetic. Preventing wasteful policies that are based on fundamental misunderstandings of reality is reason enough to talk about it. There's a great quote from HBD-archon Greg Clark about this:
"This is not an “ugly” fact. It is not a “beautiful” fact. It is just a fact. This fact helps explain why it is so hard for societies using the levers of social policy to eliminate group disparities in outcomes. It is a fact that we should be aware of in thinking about inequalities of income and wealth."
He'd say 'yeah, we already tried to convince the intelligentsia, see the Bell Curve, it didn't work'.
The evidence will only continue to grow, I think eventually it will just be too much to deny. Even with the taboo on talking about it and researching it, even with institutions like the NIH forbidding research on it, it's just inevitable that if HBD is true it will become undeniable eventually. If it's true then the sooner it's acknowledged the better for crafting effective policy, so if you believe it's true I think you should want to convince people. Of course, taking the position Scott Alexander tacitly confessed to in his Kolmogorov And The Lightning essay of not talking about it to save your social status is completely fine too, you just shouldn't discourage others from talking about it.
Your point about Ukranians and other non-US nationalities is a good one, as is the fact that we still don't know exactly how this is being done. Likewise for the point about talking heads and extraneous details about graduate degrees.
On the other hand, mass psychosis seems unlikely. They don't cite much medical evidence in the article, I wish they had included more, but if peoples' pets have been affected I don't see how psychosis can be the cause. I also think that, if these russian agents were actually seen right around the time symptoms started for these people, that's quite a big point for the Russian ray gun theory. The movements of these people coinciding with hallucinated symptoms (not just the same city but within the same block) is possible but seems unlikely. Perhaps there are enough russian spooks travelling around that you can haruspex up a specious pattern from noise but I find that hard to believe in this case.
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