popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
There is no objectively measurable art
You're only thinking of aesthetic considerations. The craft of modern architects, designers, engineers, educators, bureaucratics, welders etc etc blow their premodern equivalents out of the water by any objectively measurable metric. Like, say, how much weight a bridge can support. How far an athlete can train themselves to throw a javelin. Only in totally subjective considerations is there even an argument to be had -- which I attribute to people's predisposition to ancestor worship and IAmVerySmart-signaling status games.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I'm skeptical that old literature actually is better than new literature. Many classics seem boring, bloated, and not that deep to me, but it's low status to criticize them. In any objectively measurable art or science, or even arts that are technically subjective but kinda not like photorealistic painting, 21st century skill puts our predecessors to shame. How coincidental is it that the only field where the old masters outclass us is one where the judgement is purely subjective?
You've written a plausible sounding story for with the 18th and 19th century produced better literary iron than the 20th or 21st. These factors are a rounding error to the fact that great literature was written by a tiny subset of the Western leisure class that didn't go for parties, hunting, politics, business, science, or surrogate activities; and the circles that judged their output were a self-congratulation society.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
The other thing I'd note is that I'm in my late 30s now and I always find it odd when people my age say things like, "I could never date a woman that young" with regard to some cute twentysomething that's just out of college. I met my wife when she was that age and I suspect that I'd have just as high of an opinion of her if we'd met when I was ten years older than I was at the time. People kind of are who they are by that age with only incremental improvements or decline to be had.
Getting old sucks. People have to believe there's some upside to being uglier, having less energy, and losing the wide blue ocean potential of youth. Some people get better with age. Others get worse. As a rule, you accrue status, skills, and capital while otherwise degrading, and your human qualities remain the same.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I'm tempted to pattern-match this to how deracinated people on an identity's periphery are more likely to develop toxic simulacra of that identity - Hitler was Austrian, not German
Nitpick, this always seemed like a historically illiterate jab at the dictator. Austria not being in Germany is a pure accident of political history, the main population speaking German and being just as ethnically close as Bavarians, Hessians, Saxons, Prussians, Thuringians, and Westphalians are to one another. Austria did not join in 1871 because they were part of a large multiethnic empire under the Habsburgs and Bismark thought forcing them would destablize Eastern Europe and possibly cause Prussia to lose control over the politics of new state. Nowadays, 150 years later, there's been identity drift in Austria, in the same way there would have been if any other random prince hadn't joined the reich. In the 1930s, this was not the case.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
IMO it's not about forgiving Hitler — and by extension the Nazis — but about forgiving the conservatively four in ten people around you who, like the 1930s Germans, would support the othering, de-statusing, disenfranchising, detaining, deporting, and even destroying of a weak outrgoup minority. (Really I think it's more like eight in ten, but they have different outgroups they'd attack.)
It's psychologically devastating to know people are like that. Finding a way to forgive and integrate this and other sordid parts of human nature is the only way to go back to being happy, once you know.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I don't want to waste people's time; at the same time I don't want to give people a strong hint as to whether they're being positively weighted. The nice thing about not telling anyone at all is that it makes it much harder for malicious users to exploit the system.
How about making the system blind unless the user spends a substantial amount of time (say, two weeks) with a weight of 0, at which point you graciously let them know they're screaming into a void? Otherwise the capybara gives everyone a pat on the back every once in a while, whether their weight is 0.01 or $MAXVAL.
This makes it hard to game because it's mostly a black box, but gives people assurance that what they're doing matters and doesn't waste their time. A malicious actor probably won't spend a month getting an account into good standing to do janny duty and waiting for Pass/Fail feedback before trying again, especially with no fine-grained data on what they did wrong last time.
"affirmative action double diversity hire?"
it just seems like a mocking sneer to me
IMO it meets the standard of least inflammatory way to communicate the idea. @No_one does not believe we should take this reveal from a seemingly impressive source as seriously as "Pfizer Director, Research & Development Strategic Operations for mRNA scientific planning" implies.
as though of course a black gay guy wouldn't get a job on his own merits.
Any company that engages in DEI practices loses the benefit of doubt in this regard. By their own admission, they disavow meritocracy in hiring practices, so I'll take Pfizer at their word that hires are not by merit.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Let's say we ban gene editing entirely, and practice an older, simpler form of eugenics - freeze the sperm of the best, smartest, most honorable and strongest people in society, and have a significant portion of children come from them. And somehow everyone magically agrees this is good and not state-sponsored cuckoldry or anything. That's hardly 'transhumanism' or extinction-level. Would you oppose that?
This is an extension of the normal process of sexual selection that's been around with us as long as humans have been around. In practice, the society that does something like this will begin to resemble the many polygamous societies, which carries its own can of worms. (The padishah khan gets thousands of wives, his beys get dozens, his ghazi get two or three, and slave gets perhaps one if he's very lucky.) But I would not consider this transhumanism or autogenocide -- if perhaps unfair to the back half of the bell curve. Sexual selection is, on its own, a horror we have accustomed ourselves to to the point of not noticing -- but it is one that is intrinsic to our nature, much like eating brains is intrinsic to the botfly.
Gene editing for mental traits is an extremely obvious Schelling fence. It is hypothetically possible to do gene editing for certain mental traits that would not change the nature of humanity. However, I am confident if we take that step as a species, we will get Transhumanist-Gandhi, not 95%-Human-Gandhi.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Sorry, it was Seattle rather than California. He was writing about refugees from the Horn of Africa (ethiopians, somalians, oromo), whose children performed above the domestic black average test scores depite not speaking English at home. The results weren't collected for intelligence research but as part of the city government's report on refugee education. Here is the exact part
So, how does one of the lowest IQ scoring groups in Africa, emigrating with the lowest evidence of any selection whatsoever (economically or academically), have their children score above black Americans in one of the highest scoring states for native black Americans, (some) even outscoring Hispanics who are assimilated, before they are even assimilated themselves? How do even the Somalian refugees brought in from a total failed state catastrophe outscore black Americans as soon as they just learn to read some English?
It can certainly not be explained by any of the recent HBD answers, individually or in combination
It's beautiful to listen as Blogging the Boys or About Them Cowboys, and just hear the pain.
Yeah, that's what I most enjoy about the NFL. It's good eating when cold weather teams (eg the Packers) underperform — based on fan shows it really breaks them. (Warm weather fanbases, I notice, often check out when their team is doing poorly.)
I enjoy the NFL less than I used to though. Part of it is that people like/hate teams for regular culture war reasons these days. They hate the Texans because their QB was #MeTooed, they love the Commanders because Ron Rivera fined and publically excorciated a position coach for off-the-record comments about BLM. They love the Steelers because they hired a black coach who was fired by a 'racist' owner, they hate the Packers because their QB is a vaxx skeptic.
I just want to hate the Packers because of their stupid cheese hats.
If I want to feel out-of-control existential rage I'll go on Reddit.
You're probably a virgin because you didn't try not to be a virgin. You're a long way from high school. I guarantee you, the standards to join the had-sex club are not high. It's nothing you're going to be shamed for except by people who want to shame you for other reasons.
Assuming, for the moment, that I can achieve that with ease, is there any evidence that women can tell that a man is a virgin?
By talking to you? Or by smell, or looking awkward or something? No, that's a trope from fiction. Be at peace.
what do you mean by driving extinction..
Are you against the Flynn effect?
People nowadays have significantly higher IQs than past generious simply out of better acess to food and education.
I define a human species, subspecies, "race", ethnicity, family group, etc by genotype of mental attributes. Higher IQ, more conscientiousness, different levels of neuroticism and openness to experience due to the environment (Flynn effect or drugs) falls under phenotype. A group of monkey living in Delhi does not go extinct if tourists train them to bow and solve puzzles for treats, making them smarter and leaving more time to groom themselves.
On the other hand, if you were to use artificial selection to eliminate people with a genotype that may articulate as having lower cortical volume or a more active limbic system, you have exterminated that group of humans.
Instead of virtue signaling about non-existent problems
I said at the very beginning this is a question of values. A value does not need to be justified by pragmatism. (Indeed, you have smuggled into your complaint the totally unjustified normative value that economic growth and a higher functioning society are worth developing, or that a smarter human is "better" than a dumber human.)
When the AGI congress of 2068 proposes a bill for neutering the economically useless welfare recipient humans and uploading their consciousnesses into a more efficient digital form that allows them to hold down a job — including getting rid of those pesky family instincts, high aggression, and ability to lie — I suspect you will object, too. Your objections will not be pragmatically justified.
Did the path taken from africa to europe really pass into 'cold winter' areas? Africa -> the Levant -> Turkey -> Greece ends in europe without passing through any places that even really receive snow.
Europe itself was the cold winter area, leading to a population bottleneck. Pop-sci link.
The more dubious and interesting question would the Middle East and India. It's worth noting though that populations do not move in a linear direction, and those regions have at various points gotten heavy admixture and even outright population replacement from the north -- especially after 3500 BC or so.
If so, why aren't i.e. Zulus as high average IQ as white europeans, considering their ancestors would have had to make similar migrations?
I'm completely ignorant of Zulu history, but I'm not really seeing devastating unsurvivable winters anywhere along the migration path. As for the temperature on the highlands and mountains I'm assuming they would descend for winters like foragers, nomadic farmers, and pastoralists have throughout history. Are there any mountain ranges that would take multiple years to cross to South Africa? How was the ice age in middle Africa, I thought pretty mild?
And furthermore, 'cold winters' aren't the only source of long famines. Couldn't there be plenty of (and different types of) causes of famines in the tropical parts of africa to encourage selection toward individuals capable of long-term planning?
Maybe. I'd be interested in seeing if there was a population bottleneck akin to what happened in Europe above.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Thanks! You've found it.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
The most obvious refutation of that refutation would be that those populations are highly selected for intelligence. I am sure if someone like me who knows next to nothing about the topic can thing of this caveat, Chanda can think of it too. Does he address it?
I thought the same thing. Half-way through the series, I recall Chisala citing a black refugee population that settled in California (rather than skllled educated immigrants) where their children achieved average results in school. My assumption is that this example was cherry picked from many hundreds of refugee communities that did poorly, but there it is.
Could you rephrase this? It sounds interesting but reads to me like "I'm skeptical of HBD because every single black country has a low IQ, and every black minority population in other countries also has a low IQ." To me this sounds like pretty good first-glance evidence that the HBD story makes sense, even before you look at the genes themselves. Forgive me if I'm tired and completely misreading you.
[The poorly run dysfunction country] problem is shared with a few other areas that are not majority black
Could you give a few examples? I'm under the impression that the IQ in say, Afghanistan, is quite high despite the institutions in those areas being incredibly dysfunctional forever. (EDIT: Woah, dead wrong alert. Afghanistan looks to be in the mid eighties. This table looks to be sourced to Richard Lynn's work.)
But nearly the entire world, including the pure indigenous populations of the Americas, scores notably higher than pure blacks do, on average. [...] Unless there's some selection effect for all nonafrican populations but not subsaharan africans that I've missed(and before "Ice age", humans were already pretty widely dispersed by then).
I left this out because it's pure speculation, but the "Cold Winter" hypothesis is the one you run into the most. Populations incapabale of planning many months into the future died off any time their migration crossed a temperate climate. For example, this also explains why Mesoamerican civilizations which were also tropical or subtropical have such a high IQ and had sophisticated premodern science and maths. (Their ancestors had to pass through Siberia and over the Bering Strait.)
People who are see-no-evil-pilled typically need a quick introduction of why anyone would even think races might have varied intelligence. A quick (outdated by now) copypasta that used to get posted:
The average African-American IQ is 85, compared to the average White IQ of 100. (popocateptl note: one more recent large study in the 00s puts it at 90, but this was contested by another study that showed no change. As far as I know, no large scales studies on this have been done since.)
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstream.pdf
Human intelligence is highly heritable.
Scientific consensus is that IQ tests are not racially biased.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289608000305
Very poor Whites are comparably intelligent to very wealthy blacks.
http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html
Privately, intelligence experts hold more hereditarian views than they express in public. (popocateptl note: An anonymous survey from the mid 10s, which I'll see if I can find, polled experts and had on average them privately thinking about 50% of the achievement gap is genetic.)
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1994egalitarianfiction.pdf
Black children raised in White households have similar IQs to black children in black households.
The average African IQ is estimated at 79.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912003741
The white-black gap in SAT scores, a proxy for IQ, is increasing. (popocateptl note: the gap is actually narrowing now, but slowly.)
http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html
Genes for large brains, linked to high IQ, are common everywhere except Africa.
Intelligence has a 40-50% genetic basis.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/10/news/la-heb-genetic-study-intelligence-20110809
IQ scores are the best predictor of success in Western society.
IQ is 75% heritable among Whites.
And now for refutations. The most common response to the above syllogism is that whites in America have a shared environment. As such, things like twin studies and adoption studies which purport to show IQ as genetic, actually only show that a smart white child adopted by dumb white parents still benefits from a community and culture that cultivates their intelligence. (Systemic Racism).
For the most interesting refutation of a black-white intelligence gap, read the series of articles Chisala Chanda wrote for the Unz Review. A large part of his argument is that modern transplant populations from Africa to the UK and USA, as opposed to the descendants of slaves, do not show an achievement gap with the native populations.
EDIT: I should clarify that I'm not versed in the latest state of the art in this debate -- I made my conclusions about ten years ago now and don't find the topic that interesting, except as an example of ideological constraints causing otherwise rational societies to act in incredibly stupid ways.
There's an old meme that the best way to get help for Linux is not to ask for help on X, but to publish an overly-confident flawed diatribe about how Linux sucks because it can't do X. I suspect Race IQ debates work the same way.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Conversations in this grain tend to run short because it's a rare example of a political question where everyone acknowledges the disagreement exists at a values rather than empirical level.
The moment such enhancements become optional, they are de facto mandatory. De jure too, eventually. As a human conservationist, my values oppose embracing extinction on the grounds trans-homo sapiens sapiens will be smarter and more efficient than us. AGI will be incomparably smarter and more efficient than us. Would you extend your logic to be in favor of replacing us with it?
If you want people to accept this kind of logic, you're going to have to Straussian about it and pretend that slippery slope arguments about human modification are silly, rather than laying out the slippery slope in a seven point numbered list and then talking about how great it will be to have a society full of super-geniuses in the closing paragraph.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
It reminds me of the flawed 'domino theory'
This invasion is the third domino after Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. What is there to doubt?
Excuse me for the potentially physics-ignorant analogy, but dominoes work because the potential energy released by a domino falling is greater than the force required to knock a domino over.
In the age of industrial warfare, the windfall Russia will get from a complete annexation of Ukraine (if that's even on the table?) is lower than the costs required to conquer it — maybe it will pay off on the timescale of decades but I doubt it. This is probably true even if the US and EU weren't doing their best to make Ukraine into sandpaper.
"Actor did A, then B, then C" is different from "Actor did A which empowered them to do B which empowered them to do C".
popocatepetl
2yr ago
The Whale, the most important men’s health movie you haven’t seen yet
Looked up the plot synopsis. I can't help but think these sort of misery-porn movies backfire, if the goal is to get people healthier. You'll notice PSAs about drugs, drinking, and smoking stopped showing the worst consequences of those addictions in the past ten years, instead focusing on whimsical downsides like "If you smoke, your skin will look older!" or "If you get caught drinking and driving, you'll live at mom's for longer and will be embarrassed in front of your hot date!"
When you tell people they will SUFFER and DIE ALONE in HORRIBLE PAIN they inevitably seek comfort.... which for addicts means going on a binge.
I dunno. There's lots of advice out there for losing weight, but the common aspect of the successful strategies is that they teach adherants to (a) be mindful (b) treat their diet, body, and cravings like a science experiment, not a moral struggle to be "good" at all times.
The lesson I get out of the film is that I can’t save anyone from themselves, I can’t save anyone who isn’t pulling their own weight in seeking help, and I can’t save people while getting something from the relationship.
Yeah, that's the rub, ain't it. Everyone want to live out Good Will Hunting but people only change on their own, when they're good and ready.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
gender affirming surgery
For some reason, this is one line I feel I cannot cross. I will never ever ever call it this. I currently self-censor with "gender surgery", which fortunately I have yet to get in hay for. And I will willingly adopt a term like "secondary sex characteristic remodeling" or whatever anodyne euphemism progressives want come up with. But if it comes down to saying "gender affirming surgery" I'll just go on unemployment and become a trucker or something.
I don't really know why this is the hill I'm willing to die on, but there it is.
It's like Neocons, rather than calling it "enhanced interrogation techniques", insisted everyone must call torture "patriotic heroism techniques".
popocatepetl
2yr ago
No, clearly the Holocaust was a genocide. It wasn't ethnic cleansing. Conversely, an event like the trail of tears is ethnic cleansing but not genocide. I was correcting word choice because I find linguistic erosion annoying.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I thought your post was funny and didn't seem mean-spirited. I could see how someone would take umbrage, of course. (+2 cents)
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Mistake theory was the default in the USA until somewhere in the Obama administration. Oddly, the exceptions to this used to mainly be on the right: for example, people who listened to Rush Limbaugh and talked about Democrats wanting to destroy America. However, even in very tense controversies like gay marriage and abortion, the basic assumption was that your opponents were just deluded unless they were protesting at gay soldier funerals or vandalizing abortion clinics or whatever.
I see it like workplace romance. Institutions have an incentive to crack down, but there's no moral crime being done. My advice is, like with workplace romance, to keep it a secret until one partner leaves.
As for age gaps, the taboo against 50yos dating 20yos is a relic of the version of our civilization that enforced monogamy. Widowers double dipping with fertile women is a form of polygamy that crimps the supply of wives of mediocre males. Now that society doesn't meaningfully enforce monogamy, that taboo is just an old, irrational prejudice.
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