madeofmeat
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User ID: 1063
madeofmeat
17d ago
The other problem is that even if the "because genetics" explanation brings compelling evidence (which definitely happens) it isn't actionable except to refute a "because racism" explanation that was already lacking supporting evidence.
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.
madeofmeat
18d 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.
It makes sense that if the mod started out as a regular participant in the conversation, they should be hesitant to switch to modhat posting. When the first thing the mod posts in the conversation is a modhat post, it doesn't make sense that they'd need a second mod to make more modhat posts.
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