madeofmeat
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User ID: 1063
madeofmeat
7d ago
The closest I've come to encountering a coherent proposal from "group average aficionados" is on immigration policy, generally taking the form of blanket/severe prohibitions against immigrants from countries with low average IQ (or whatever). But if IQ is of such vital importance, why not just test for it directly rather than relying on a crude circuitous heuristic? I took an IQ test myself and scored extremely high,[4] so what do you gain by overlooking that in favor of the purported average of ~37 million people?
I don't see why you present this part as a big gotcha. My first instinct is to say "that sounds great, let's do exactly that!" Bit of a problem with further thought though is that IQ tests mostly work because they're currently low stakes and there isn't much incentive to try to get good at gaming them. If you suddenly made them a pivotal load-bearing component on a very important and desirable thing, you'd get an overnight IQ test prep industry popping up, with all the existing tests immediately leaked to serve as practice material. You'd still get some signal, but I'm pretty sure months of practice are going to skew IQ test results. I'm probably still on the side of trying this, do it for a while and see how much of a problem the test prep ends up being.
Progressives are already viciously allergic to accepting the conclusions that naturally flow from their own worldview.
This last part feels like it takes a bit of a swerve with the argument and I'm not sure I see how it fits in any total thesis for the post. It feels like it maybe should've been a whole second post. Looks like you're gesturing towards a wider pattern, I guess seen in The Cult of Smart too, that depressed IQ is gonna depressed IQ, even if it's environmentally caused, with all the expected bad effects for life outcomes, but progressives are basically just equivocating accepting this into full acceptance of immutable hereditary IQ differences and denying both with equal vehemence. It's certainly a possible angle of attack, but it seems that if you want to keep talk of the possible genetic group differences off the table, we'd still be mostly in the status quo where people will just aggressively go for the "genetic group differences are impossible, actually" angle, since arguing back against this is not allowed. They can then just go back to playing the endless game of claiming structural racism and use the noise from this to draw attention away from practical problems like what you pointed out.
madeofmeat
1mo ago
Ping @ZorbaTHut, the glossary looks like a valuable project, is it possible to raise the post length limit for this specific post?
Okay, how's this:
The belief that genetics cause significant individual differences in socially significant mental traits of people, such as temperament and intelligence, and these differences may be difficult or impossible to change with environmental interventions. For example, people might have an innate level of intelligence that cannot be meaningfully raised and that isn't high enough for effectively learning complex and high-status jobs for many people. Opposed to a belief held implicitly in much of mid-to-late 20th century sociology and cultural anthropology that differences in such features are culturally determined and can be fully remedied with environmental interventions like extending compulsory education and policing racist microaggressions. The thing Steven Pinker writes about in his book The Blank Slate and Charles Murray in Human Diversity.
madeofmeat
1mo ago
Suggested addition: The various [color] tribes, red, blue and grey, and possibly violet.
Ingroup / outgroup / fargroup for that matter, and the weird dynamics that follow, like blue tribe turning a blind eye to Islam because they see it as the irrelevant fargroup and red tribe as the existential risk outgroup.
madeofmeat
1mo ago
The HBD entry struck me as a bit weird as well. It doesn't feel like it's difficult to define, like something like 'Moloch' might be (could also be added to the glossary btw), so it's confusing why you seem to be playing coy with this one thing all of a sudden.
Also, the "von" in von Neumann should be lower case.
madeofmeat
1mo ago
madeofmeat
2mo ago
I think what's currently being done is that first someone does a GWAS study to figure out the markers for whatever we want to control, like height. Then in vitro fertilization techniques are used to make dozens of fertilized eggs, they're all sequenced, and you look at the markers given by the GWAS study on each and pick the one you prefer. That's not do-everything genetic engineering yet, you're still rolling the same old dice, but now you can roll them on the lab bench, look at some of the numbers early on and pick the one you like best.
madeofmeat
2mo ago
I thought people were reacting to the woke reverse discrimination policies and systemic racism discourse that are driven by the argument that because "blank slatism" is obviously true, we need to be obsessively following societal outcomes by race and interpret any disparity as necessary proof of racism. Charles Murray says this is the reason he wrote Facing Reality, the guy Hanania is chiding claims that the woke "equality thesis" leading to unending recriminations about white racism as long as outcome disparity remains is why he's writing his stuff.
Most people seem like they would be happy to go back to a 1990s style color blindness detente, assuming it was applied evenly. You don't talk about race and intelligence publicly and you don't do racial grievance identity politics. What we got instead is that people took "there are no racial differences in intelligence" as the implicit uncontroversial truth, and drew up the whole intellectual edifice of systemic racism from that. What this has already cashed out in practice has been a complete travesty of "evaluating people on the basis of individual ability/merit", and this shows no sign of stopping. People just go "what can you do, we must keep fighting against systemic racism until it goes away".
madeofmeat
2mo ago
The HBD discourse is fueled by people freaking out over representation in high-status classes like successful CEOs, scientists and Ivy League applicants. People get into those by being outliers on a standard distribution in talent, and this amplifies small initial population differences. A relatively small difference in mean IQ between populations that looks inconsequential in everyday tasks can still end up making the tail of people capable of becoming theoretical physicists have a 2x overrepresentation of people from the higher mean IQ population.
madeofmeat
2mo ago
Greg Egan's Permutation City is a classic example. It starts out with your usual Matrix-like virtual world thing but then gets weirder than that,
madeofmeat
3mo ago
That’s my whole point. I suspect that there is perhaps no sequence of events that could happen that would convince the Science crowd that NHI exists.
A Russian family that had cut all contacts to civilization and lived in the woods as hermits figured out Sputnik from seeing a new "star" that moved very fast across the sky. There's a lot of very observable new things you can make happen if you want and have the technology for it.
madeofmeat
4mo ago
What qualifies someone to be a major public intellectual?
People from outside their religion regularly taking their arguments seriously would be a good start. Modern Christian apologetics don't seem to be having much headway with people who aren't already looking to be sold on Christianity.
madeofmeat
5mo ago
Who's Harding?
madeofmeat
9mo ago
If I hadn’t read too much Hanson over the years I would likely be a true believer in the alien stuff.
What do you make of Hanson apparently thinking the alien stuff is legit nowadays? As far as I understood, he thinks "they're here but we don't see them colonizing the galaxy" can make sense if there was just one abiogenesis event in the Milky Way, it led to both life on Earth and an alien civilization somewhere reasonably close in the stellar neighborhood through some sort of panspermia process. This would mean the single alien civilization that's contacting us has no serious competition driving it to visibly messing up the galaxy and is close enough they can reach us with less impressive interstellar technology that one that turns an entire galaxy into Dyson spheres.
madeofmeat
9mo ago
Anyone who hears about Emil Kirkegaard, Steve Sailer et al, for the first time, googles them, and picks the result that shows up very near top.
madeofmeat
11mo ago
The Flat Earther thing looks superficially like 20th century science crackpottery, but it's socially more like a fandom. The old-school crackpot theorists were individual deranged people pursuing their theories about free energy generators or the value of pi being wrong. Flat Earth is a worldview stance more than a complex scientific theory, and all that's expected of a follower is to assert that they believe this to be a fact. "Pi is actually 3.1446..." or "nuclear power isn't real" don't have quite the same immediate worldview shifting juice for someone reading about them and then professing to believe them as "the Earth is flat" has. The people making the Flat Earth materials might be mostly insincere, but the follower fandom seems quite real, and before social media crackpot theories didn't really have fandoms like this.
madeofmeat
11mo ago
Dan Freedman's babies. There's also a video.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
Rules of thumb for less embarrassing culture are that it's not quite contemporary (things from 20 years ago are different, things from 50 years ago are different again), while maybe being Lindy enough to have stayed somewhat on the radar until now and not fine-tuned to have 14-year-olds as its core audience. Closer details are very much an illegible signaling game. Good starting point is probably to try to not be stuck in the comfort zone of fiction made to be effortlessly consumed by teenagers and get some sense of perspective with things aimed at adults.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
FWIW, I did feel instant cringe at your OP juxtaposed with your username. I can't really see making a big deal out of wanting to see superhero movies fit the aesthetics of positive conservatism. Either declaring the movies as low-value culture that's beneath you (despite finding them fun), or just going to see the movie because you think you'll enjoy it no matter what the filmmakers believe would be fine. The problem is maybe less that you enjoy the movie but more that you come off as not knowing any culture you find much higher-value than a superhero movie because going to see the superhero movie seems to present such a major dilemma for you.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
madeofmeat
1yr ago
madeofmeat
1yr ago
Default view on an user's @-page should probably be comments, not posts, since people don't write a lot of standalone posts here.
It suggest an actionable solution of researching gene therapies that increase intelligence.
Also, setting up some sort of baseline welfare state and somewhat paternalistic social institutions instead of engineering society with the assumption that everybody could train themselves to perform a well-paid knowledge work job and consistently make rational personal decisions if it weren't for moral failings like laziness, and that the people who don't manage that deserve what's coming to them.
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