ymeskhout
4d ago
I tried a couple of personal trainers after taking a ridiculously deep dive on qualifications, and found both to generally be a waste of time. What's been most helpful actually was asking chatGPT4 for advice on how to craft a very specific routine in line with my preferences. For example, I've been weightlifting for years using basic compound lifts and asked it to do a general physical audit to see where I'm lagging behind. Because I managed to do 30 pushups in 30 seconds, it told me I definitely didn't need to focus on upper body strength, but in comparison I barely could last 10 seconds on a closed-eyes one-legged-stand test. Given the filters I gave it, it then suggested adding split squats to my routine. It's great stuff.
ymeskhout
13d ago
you were grilling me like a prosecutor with very simplistic and direct questions and it felt on many occasions that you were coming at me in bad faith or with an agenda. I don't think that's what you wanted to do, but I also think you have a lot of unexamined biases.
There was no malice at all on my end, and I'm more than open to having any of my unexamined biases pointed out. My goal with asking questions is ideally to reach a point where I can pass an ideological Turing test and be able to accurately rephrase my interlocutor's position. The questions I ask therefore come from what appears to me to be either contradictions, ambiguity, or lack of evidence. I can't claim to really understand someone's beliefs or how they came to form those belifs if I gloss over that nagging curiosity. I understand that any categorization will run into limitations. I wouldn't expect the answer to my question about who is white to come with crisp demarcated lines, but I am nevertheless interested in how someone would try formulating an (imperfect) answer.
Second, I am clearly someone who is engaging in good faith in an adversarial environment, and deserve be treated entirely on my own merits, and not be spoken down to because of your interactions with past interlocuters of an ostensibly similar worldview.
You're right about this. It was wrong of me to impugn you by association and I retract and apologize for that.
I agree with almost everything you said. If we had six hours, I would've started the discussion with "how do you know who is white?". I tried to pin Walt on some answers about "white interest policies" but there were only so many ways I could rephrase a question. I know a white supremacist I've been talking to for years who has been agonizingly obfuscatory on very elementary questions across many years, so I didn't have high hopes for clarity. Edit: It was wrong of me to impugn @WaltBismarck by association, especially through a connection he has explicitly abandoned.
ymeskhout
13d ago
For what it's worth, I had exactly the same misinterpretation and for a moment assumed it was a quoting a civil rights plaintiff attorney
ymeskhout
13d ago
I think you can take it they're selling the shellfish on, well unless they're planning a multi-generational get-together of an enormous clam bake 😁
It wasn't always clear. The personal limit was something like 20 clams, and the guy who collected 789 clams was definitely selling them somewhere, but the guy who collected 64 above the limit? He told the officer it was indeed for a family feast but who knows.
ymeskhout
13d ago
But your Cambodian friends doing it are not acting weird, they probably think the Canadians are the weird ones for "what do you mean you can't dig for clams?"
That's my best guess. I had a similar experience with dumbfounded Mexicans arrested for DUIs who seemed genuine in their bafflement "what do you mean you can't drink and drive?"
ymeskhout
13d ago
My point is that progressives who are spooked by their shadow accidently spelling out the n-word have such an insanely high aversion to acknowledging the immutable negative effects that their own framework would logically predict, that it's even more hopeless to expect them to ever acknowledge the immutable negative effects if it comes from a field of study that they've already rejected and tarnished by association.
ymeskhout
13d ago
I don't see why you present this part as a big gotcha.
If that's a big gotcha, it would only apply to someone who is using average country IQ as a pretext for pursuing the ulterior goal of limiting immigration for plainly racist reasons. I'm not claiming everyone who acknowledges the reality of IQ is hiding behind a pretext. Your point about gameable IQ tests is admittedly outside my wheelhouse, but the evidence I'm aware of regarding the SAT (itself just a proxy IQ test) tutoring according to Freddie deBoer indicates it has little to no impact (see bullet point 4).
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.
It's not that I don't think people should research or mention group differences, I just don't think emphasizing their salience is going to convince anyone who isn't already convinced. If you want a bothsideism from me, it would be that I believe the "because racism" camp on the left and "because genetics" camp on the right are too often used reflexively and with lacking evidence. 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. The one point I'd give to the "because racism" camp assuming it actually proves its claim is that at least it it's more likely to give you an actionable solution.
ymeskhout
16d ago
There's a transcript on the Substack page:
And I understand that now you are trying to build a healthier culture, but I think, just like I would say to someone who was a communist back in the day and then softened towards liberalism but still loved their communist phase and still talked about how proud they were about cheering on Mao Zedong and so forth, I would say, no, screw that. Mao Zedong was evil. If you want to join a different side, you have to join a different side.
Analogies are not meant to perfectly map, and Hitler never came up in the discussion.
ymeskhout
15d ago
***As an aside, why did no one challenge this part? The "fuck white people" articles wasn't the start of history. Up-front pro-white interests had been the norm for centuries. It's odd to frame the soft WN stance as reactive to being mocked by non-whites starting in 2014.
There was only so much time and it was already extremely difficult to stick to one point at a time, it's always a judgment call about which issue to latch onto. I admit that "Everyday Feminism article headlines radicalized me" as an explanation caught me off-guard in the moment.
ymeskhout
12d ago
The correct thing to do here is to start with Brand A and then apply the test on top of that. What non-political (mindkilled) reason could you even possibly have to screw around with Brand B in the first place?
Thanks for putting numbers on your analogy. How much of a quality delta between the two brands of nails would your conclusion remain true for you? I understand that a 10/99 difference is too wide for you to bother testing the other brand, so at what point would you change your mind?
ymeskhout
16d ago
I linked to the Wikitionary entry for Hajnal line, but it's a mistake on my end to rely on Wikipedia as a source here. I default to linking to Wikipedia which works fine as a starting point for more information for almost every topic but because I'm not steeped in the race & IQ sphere, I had forgotten how zealous the Wikipedia editors have been on "sanitizing" this particular topic (I'm fairly sure there was a motte effortpost that convincingly outlined how insane the editors had gotten). If you have a better source to link to, let me know.
ymeskhout
13d ago
I should've maybe been more explicit that progressives only complain about mutable negative effects, like poverty. I've never encountered a progressive who has been willing to assert anything similar to "[race] has lower IQ and higher impulsivity, because of [environmental factor]". The filter tends to be on that first clause. I'm aware of only one major progressive scientist who acknowledges the heritability of IQ and other traits but her name escapes me at the moment.
I believe that regression to the mean is highly supported by observations and data when it comes to the children of recent immigrants.
Trace suggested I preemptively address this but I couldn't take this argument seriously. The first problem is that it's explicitly moving the goalposts by conceding that a high IQ immigrant might be ok, but concern might still be warranted due to a hypothetical risk regarding their kids. The second problem is that the only method of properly estimating someone's "mean regression potential" (there might be a better word for this equilibrium) would be measuring a sufficient sample of their ancestors, which at just 3 generations (completely made up threshold) would mean data from 14 ancestors (2 parents + 4 grandparents + 8 great-grandparents) across 75-100 years. This is obviously impractical, but the further you stray from this the more you're on speculative ground. Simply assuming that "country of origin average" as a sufficient proxy for "mean regression potential" is definitely the most practical option, but it's still highly speculative and also flattens whatever variability may exist within a country's subpopulations or ethnic groups. The final problem is the number of hypotheticals this concern is predicated upon. "We should pre-emptively prohibit individuals who might have a low regression to the mean potential from immigrating because they might have kids who might have lower IQ which might also be lower than native average IQ" isn't very compelling.
@SwordOfOccam I admit I was caught off-guard by Walt's answer in the moment, but this was my genuine understanding of regression to the mean. I welcome your critique.
Of course HBDers would probably still agree to this plan if it was an option on the table, but this discussion is heavily suppressed by the enemy.
I've already addressed this in the post. It just doesn't make sense to say "gee I wish we could test for IQ directly but leftists are whining too much so I guess my only choice is to ban all immigration based on country averages oh darn". If the first option isn't available because of [reasons], neither would the second option!
ymeskhout
15d ago
I don't understand the demarcation is, except that you appear to use ethnicity to mean "sort of culture and upbringing"? Like accents and manners? I was born and raised in Morocco but I get clocked as having lived away for decades almost immediately when I go back and visit, so would you say my "ethnicity" changed?
ymeskhout
16d ago
I appreciate the snippet. It sounds like the book's thesis is essentially about "here's how race and demographic changes influence people's political opinions". I fully acknowledge that people do form race-based identity groups while simultaneously believing it's not constructive or useful. Am I off base?
ymeskhout
12d ago
Mostly, I got the feeling you didn’t know what regression to the mean could mean in the podcast, though I figured you had to know the concept and I would expect you had heard it used in this context before. I got a flash of the “per capita” insanity
Can you elaborate what you meant by "per capita" insanity? Given what I wrote above about regression to the mean, do you identify any deficiencies in my understanding of it? I'm more than happy to being corrected here. I've never heard of the regression argument before in response to the immigration topic so I was just surprised in the moment, but I'm also very much not immersed within the race & IQ rabbit hole.
It strikes me as strange you can’t pass an IIT in that affinity for one’s kin and preference for similarity in appearance and belief is highly traditional. White nationalists tend to point out examples like Japan and Israel (the latter being more complicated) as their preferred type of country. This is extremely common in Europe too. Obviously, “whiteness” is hard to define in any robust way, but these types have a pretty strong “I know it when I see it” vibe, not strict logical definitions.
I'll try to give a very brief synopsis on my approach here, but a full dissection will need a much longer effortpost. The reason why (if I had 6 hours to record) I would start with the question "how do you know who is white?" would be for exactly the same reasons I would ask, for example, a diehard believer that hot dogs are sandwiches "how do you know what is a sandwich?" So many common categories we regularly use are unconsciously accepted, and generally there's no reason to crisply demarcate their specific boundary lines because...who cares? Things change when the category itself is elevated as the central organizing focus. An answer from the hot dog guy would probably be "well I look at the food in question and I check to see if it has a central savory ingredient that is surrounded by two layers of bread" or whatever. Once the hot dog guy establishes his own boundaries for what food should be included in the venerated sandwich category, my next question would be "why is inclusion in the category important to you?"
Going one level up in complexity from sandwiches, I've observed an insanely high overlap regarding how white nationalists describe being white, and how transwomen describe being a woman. I would go through the same process, I'd want my interlocutors to explain in their own words how they determine how someone fits into a category that is clearly very important to them. Once they establish these boundaries themselves, the next phase of questioning would be to discern whether they care about the underlying traits or about achieving membership in a specific category. My overall thesis is that membership is sought out because of the background associations attached to the category. This is why for many transwomen it doesn't matter how much you compliment their outward expression or whatever, they'll still deem it a failure if they are not slotted into the 'woman' category.
I haven't figured out the best vocabulary to satisfyingly describe what I think is going, so bear with me. First, imagine a generic list of generally positive traits broadly associated with "woman" (caring, graceful, nurturing, beautiful, etc). Some of the dynamic I suspect is happening with the trans discourse is a sort of delusion that if someone succeeds in checking off enough superficial traits associated with "woman" (long hair, make-up, dress, high-pitched voice, etc) then that person also be successfully associated with the broader constellation. Something like "if I have long hair then people will slot me into the 'woman' category, and if I'm in that category then I'll also be beautiful by definition".
I suspect something similar is playing out with people's attachment to race. There are an infinite number of ways to slice "preference for similarity in appearance". It could include anything from hair style, hair color, cheekbone shape, neck length, gut size, toe nail shape, overall height, overall weight, beard length, etc etc. Picking one dimension and reifying it as the central organizational filter strikes me as arbitrary, but it makes sense if what people are after isn't the trait itself, but rather the formidable constellation of associations linked with the trait.
That's all terse given the subject matter, and not communicated in the most elegant manner. But let me know if any of the above makes any sense.
ymeskhout
15d ago
Racial interests are just whatever the racial voting bloc wants. I think the majority of whites would support complete abolition of affirmative action, therefore it's a white interest even if the actual effects of that abolition aren't necessarily beneficial to whites.
I appreciate the steelman. I don't claim that racial interests can't exist, it just that they get diluted and meaningless very quickly. A sunscreen subsidy could obviously be a "light-skinned racial interest" because it targets as close to the thing itself. Can you really say that affirmative action is against "white interest" when 29% of whites are in favor? It's probably more meaningful to say that ending affirmative action is a "republican interest" given the 14/74 approve/disapprove ratio compared to every other categorization. The more disagreement you have about an issue within a population category, the less useful the category is on that topic. With race categories, we seem to run out of issues that are rationally relevant very fast.
ymeskhout
3mo ago
I'm not saying it's certain they're going to go after his law school, but he's in a uniquely vulnerable position right now, with very few allies in a position to help him
I think this concern is highly exaggerated. Trace has visibility on his side, and a longstanding relationship with two prominent journalists who have shown no aversion to controversy. For what it's worth, I'd devote my full legal practice to defending him if he faces any retribution I can do something about.
True The Vote, the group behind the wildly popular "2000 Mules" film that purported to document extensive election fraud in Georgia, has admitted to a judge that it doesn't have evidence to back its claims.
Y'all know I love my hobby horse, even if it's beaten into an absolute paste, and I admit at having ongoing puzzlement as to why 2020 stolen election claims retain so much cachet among republican voters and officials. TTV has a pattern of making explosive allegations of election fraud only to then do whatever it takes to resist providing supporting evidence. TTV has lied about working with the FBI and also refused to hand over the evidence they claimed to have to Arizona authorities. In Georgia, TTV went as far as filing formal complaints with the state, only to then try to withdraw their complaints when the state asked for evidence. The founder of TTV was also briefly jailed for contempt in 2022 because of her refusal to hand over information in a defamation lawsuit where TTV claimed an election software provider was using unsecured servers in China. Edit: @Walterodim looked into this below and I agree the circumstances are too bizarre to draw any conclusions about the founder's intentions.
I have a theory I'm eager to have challenged, and it's a theory I believe precisely explains TTV's behavior: TTV is lying. My operating assumption is that if someone uncovers extensive evidence of election fraud, they would do whatever they can to assist law enforcement and other interested parties in fixing this fraud. TTV does not do this, and the reason they engage in obstinate behavior when asked to provide evidence is because they're lying about having found evidence of election fraud. It's true that they file formal complaints with authorities, but their goal is to add a patina of legitimacy to their overall allegations. TTV's overriding motivation is grifting: there is significant demand within the conservative media ecosystem for stolen election affirmations, and anyone who supplies it stands to profit both financially as well as politically. We don't have direct financial statements but we can glean the potential profitability from how 2000 Mules initially cost $29.99 to watch online, and the millions in fundraising directed towards TTV (including a donor who sued to get his $2.5 million back). There's also a political gain because Trump remains the de facto leader of the conservative movement, and affirming his 2020 stolen election claims is a practical requirement for remaining within the sphere.
I know this topic instigates a lot of ire and downvotes, but I would be very interested to hear substantive reasons for why my theory is faulty or unreasonable! I believe I transparently outlined my premises and the connective logic in the above paragraph, so the best way to challenge my conclusion could be either to dispute a premise, or to rebut any logical deduction I relied on. You could also do this by pointing out anything that is inconsistent with my theory. So for example if we were talking about how "John murdered Jane", something inconsistent with that claim could be "John was giving a speech at the time of Jane's murder". I would also request that you first check if any of your rebuttals are an example of 'belief in belief' or otherwise replaying the 'dragon in my garage' unfalsifiability cocoon. The best way to guard against this trap would be to explain why your preferred explanation fits the facts better than mine, and also to proactively provide a threshold for when you'd agree that TTV is indeed just lying.
I'm excited for the responses!
Edit: I forgot I should've mentioned this, but it would be really helpful if responses avoided motte-and-bailey diversions. This post is about TTV and their efforts specifically, and though I believe stolen election claims are very poor quality in general, I'm not making the argument that "TTV is lying, ergo other stolen election claims are also bullshit". I think there are some related questions worth contemplating (namely why TTV got so much attention and credulity from broader conservative movement if TTV were indeed lying) but changing the subject isn't responsive to a topic about TTV. If anyone insists on wanting to talk about something else, it would be helpful if there's an acknowledgement about TTV's claims specifically. For example, it can take the format of "Yes, it does appear that TTV is indeed lying but..."
ymeskhout
16d ago
I'm never going to ask someone to do a book report for free. What would you say are the main points that I would find relevant?
ymeskhout
2mo ago
Conspiracy Investigation Done Right
In 1996, TWA Flight 800 exploded and crashed into the ocean off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board. After an extensive four-year investigation, the NTSB concluded the explosion was caused by a short circuit ignition within the center fuel tank. Or at least that's the official story.
Now normally when you encounter a disclaiming phrase like that it tends to be a klaxon warning to strap in because you're about to hear some crazy shit about what really happened. I'm not going to argue for some crazy shit though, instead I want to showcase a real-life illustration on how to properly investigate and litigate what otherwise would be dismissed and derided as some crazy shit.
Someone (thanks Jim!) brought to my attention this pending lawsuit that aims to challenge the TWA 800 official narrative.[1] The basic summary you need to know is that, in contrast to the official story, the "alternative" narrative claims the airplane was hit by an SM-2 surface-to-air missile launched by the United States government during a weapons testing exercise. You can read the 38-page lawsuit complaint yourself where they allege:
Defendants [Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, US Government, etc.] negligently, recklessly, or intentionally authorized and conducted the testing of missiles in commercial airspace. As a result of these tests, a missile downed TWA 800 and killed Plaintiffs' decedents.
And humorously enough:
Defendants owed decedents and Plaintiffs a duty not to negligently test missiles in commercial airspace. Defendants breached that duty by negligently testing missiles in commercial airspace.
TO BE CLEAR: I find the overall claim to be extremely implausible based on Bayesian reasoning I'll get to later, but the focus here is less about delving into the specific allegations[2] and more about showcasing how one should go about uncovering a criminal conspiracy that otherwise sounds kooky on its face.
As far as I can tell, the law firm involved has a reputation for serious lawyers doing serious work. The complaint they filed directly addresses many procedural issues that would normally be a hindrance for these types of claims. For example, the major hurdle would be the statute of limitations given that the explosion took place in 1996 but the lawyers cite the fraudulent concealment exception based on some FOIA foot-dragging:
Specifically, key evidence confirming that a missile caused the crash of TWA 800 was hidden from the public and the victims' families for over 25 years. This evidence was only recently unearthed by Dr. Tom Stalcup in his hard-fought FOIA litigation, which has now been pending for over ten years....Before April 15, 2021, the Plaintiffs were not aware of, or on notice of, the information that forms the basis of this complaint, nor have the Plaintiffs had any reasonable opportunity discover their injury, its cause, and the link between the two.
The legal system relies on attorneys as an (imperfect) screening mechanism to separate valid claims from the torrential garbage. Before an attorney can rouse a court into examining a claim, Rule 11 requires them to affirm that the attorney has made reasonable efforts to investigate it themselves to make sure they're not just re-shoveling whatever bullshit their client dropped on their lap. The lawsuit offers specific allegations about which government agencies were involved in the cover-up, when the cover-up took place, and how it took place. A sample:
The FBI essentially froze the NTSB out of the investigation. The FBI removed all copies (original and duplicates) of Navy radar tapes from the Navy, placing them out of the NTSB's reach, and refused to allow the NTSB to conduct eyewitness interviews or review the FBI's records that indicated the true cause of the TWA 800 crash...the CIA concocted materials to discredit eyewitnesses who could confirm that TWA 800 had been downed by some kind of projectile. These materials included a video and animation that was displayed during a nationally-televised FBI press conference that attempted to reconcile the eyewitness testimony that the plane was struck by a projectile with the U.S. Government's official position that the crash was caused by a defect in the plane's center fuel tank.
They even pontificate on what might have prompted a rush towards testing live warheads over a populated area:
The Aegis System's radar also needed improvement in its ability to operate close to shore and to properly integrate into existing systems...These serious flaws could result in a missile striking an unintended target...Instead of waiting five years for ships to be properly constructed with the SPY-ID(V) [an advanced radar system] so that testing could be conducted far from congested air corridors and at established test ranges, the SPY-ID(V) was tested on an expedited basis in and around the CSEDS in New Jersey, in a highly congested area.
And they managed to track down evidence of missile testing right around the time and place of interest:
An electrician on the roof of a nearby Long Island hospital was filming the sunrise and captured the second missile witnessed by the Coastguardsman on his VHS camera [five days before TWA 800 went down]...on November 16, 1996, almost precisely where TWA 800 went down off Long Island, a Pakistani Airlines pilot reported to Air Traffic Control that a "rocket" rose in front of him and continued rising above his altitude.
I've only picked a sample, there's a lot more details in the complaint. In contrast to the persistent and arguably intentional vagueness found in many disdained conspiracy theories, I'm genuinely impressed by how comprehensive the lawsuit's claims are regarding who/how/why. They explain exactly which organizations are involved in the cover-up and the evidence behind that belief, which missile system brought the plane down and the evidence behind that, specific reasons for why live warhead testing took place in a busy air traffic corridor, and explanations for why it took so long to uncover all this.
If (again, arguendo) TWA Flight 800 was indeed brought down by reckless missile testing involving a live warhead and this was covered-up by the government, then the way this lawsuit is conducted is the best opportunity for legal redress. The legal system has serious and persistent deficiencies with its inability to offer all petitioners the relief they're owed, but certain rules and expectations it has developed over time are worthy of replication.
As a foil, the strengths of how the TWA 800 complaints are presented become more obvious when it's contrasted against another lawsuit whose deficiencies resulted in Rule 11 sanctions for the lawyers that filed it. In 2020, two Colorado attorneys filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of all registered voters in the country, and sought $160 billion in punitive damages, alleging the election was stolen from Trump.[3] Their 84-page complaint (plus a dozen affidavits) alleges that a wide roster of defendants (Dominion, Facebook, various state governors, and "1 to 10,000" as-of-yet unidentified co-conspirators) engaged in unspecified-but-definitely illegal conduct. For example, here's what one of the supporting affidavits claimed:
After much research and contemplation, it has come to my attention that the 2020 general election, and probably many more, have been compromised by a number of persons, including a corporation in the United States called Dominion Voting Machines, Inc., and others, such as, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan; and other individuals acting as governors and secretaries of state, including, Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, and Gretchen Whitmer and Jocelyn Bensen from Michigan.
Contrast this "research and contemplation" with the straightforward allegation of "The Navy and various defense contractors caused an airline explosion by deciding to test live warheads in a highly-populated area". The magistrate who ordered sanctions against the Colorado attorneys noted their conspicuous aversion to investigation:
It appears that Plaintiffs' counsel's process for formulating the factual allegations in this lawsuit was to compile all the allegations from all the lawsuits and media reports relating to alleged election fraud (and only the ones asserting fraud, not the ones refuting fraud), put it in one massive complaint, then file it and 'see what happens.'...Material, including affidavits, from other lawsuits was accepted at face value, with no apparent critical assessment. Mr. Fielder says he watched videos and listened to talk show interviews with some of the experts involved. He also says relied on his own many years' experience as a lawyer to "connect the dots."
Pro-tip: don't decide to file a lawsuit after listening to a podcast.
Back to the TWA 800 case, the central claim involving the US accidentally shooting down a passenger airline isn't impossible because it happened once in 1988 with Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 people on board. What's least plausible of all with TWA 800 is how the military, the defense contractors, and the law enforcement agencies involved managed a successful cover-up over so many people over such a long period of time.
There's an oft-utilized but facile heuristic that claims that if there was a cover-up, then someone would've leaked it, and so therefore no leak = no cover-up. This is unreliable because there plenty of government cover-ups that were successful, at least for a while. The Tuskegee Syphilis study went on for 40 years until an AP story in 1972. Operation Mockingbird, MKUltra, and COINTELPRO all took place in the 1950s but weren't exposed until the 1970s. Project SUNSHINE which involved collecting body parts from dead children to study radioactive fallout started in 1953, didn't become publicly known until 1956, and the full extent wasn't fully exposed until the 1990s.
However, the common elements with these schemes is that they all involved either a small number of conspirators, or had victims that no one really gave a shit about. None of this is reflected in Flight 800, its 230 dead, and the multiple entities implicated.
The incentive behind the cover-up doesn't make much sense either, because anyone helping with the cover-up has no way of knowing ahead of time whether it will remain under wraps, especially if perpetual silence relies on the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people. You only need one leak and if the whole thing blows open, no one wants to be left holding the proverbial gun while everyone is pointing fingers at each other. Anyone at the decision fulcrum faces an obvious pay-off from defection that needs a serious countervailing cooperation pay-off to convince them into shouldering that level of culpability.
The lawsuit allegations also rely heavily on eyewitness testimony (though with some video corroboration), which is particularly unreliable and prone to suggestion when it involves widely publicized events like an airline crash. Lay witnesses who lack the appropriate specialized training and background are vulnerable to misinterpreting what they see or hear.
Implausible is still not the same as impossible, and crazier shit has happened before. If there's any validity to these wild claims at all, this lawsuit tees up a stellar attempt at uncovering the truth.
[1] I've long had an aversion to describing anything as a 'conspiracy theory' because it's often wielded as a discussion-terminating cudgel. Once the label is affixed, the very notion of scrutinizing, investigating, or grappling with the underlying claims is dismissed as a waste of time.
[2] The Flight 800 Wikipedia page has lots more of the technical details if you're so inclined.
[3] The two lawyers, Gary Fielder and Ernest Walker, were acting on their own and had no connection to Donald Trump or his campaign.
ymeskhout
1mo ago
Making fun of stupid people for being stupid is sneering.
Intelligence is not the only relevant axis here. I represented someone who had an IQ of around 60-80 and he was one of my favorite clients ever. He got dinged on a DUI and was super respectful and always on time to our meetings, and I really felt for him when he expressed fear and earnest confusion about why he was in trouble. He was verifiably the least intelligent client I've ever had, but he never lied to me or the cops ("Yes I was drinking tonight sir, I am so sorry sir, I am so sorry sir.") and except for that one case he just carried on his life working as a nighttime janitor.
The clients I laugh about above also lack intelligence but to a lesser degree that the janitor. What really sets them apart is their dishonesty combined with the baseless confidence that deludes them into thinking they can successfully pull off their cons.
The Happy Birthday Question
in which I write about HBD
The Rogue Fishermen
Back in my early public defender days, one of the niche misdemeanors I'd be periodically appointed to was for unlawful fishing. Typically the offense took place at a beach, involving someone harvesting dozens and dozens of shellfish beyond the allowable amount while a Fish & Wildlife officer hides in the trees with binoculars meticulously counting how many individual clams went into what particular bag. Out of the dozen or so cases I've handled, every single defendant —100%— was a Cambodian man.
Since the general population is not 100% Cambodian (let alone Cambodian men), a class of criminal defendants that is exclusively Cambodian is an undeniable example of a disparate outcome. We're missing a ton of vocabulary precision on this issue, so please bear with me but when I say race, I'm using it broadly to include ethnicity and basically any related phenotype. And when I say racial discrimination, I'm using it to mean discrimination based on race itself rather than discrimination on a collateral trait that may end up with a racial correlation.
Now if you want to pull a Kendi here, the only explanation for racial disparate outcomes is racial discrimination. This is always patently facile logic because 1) it doesn't do the work[1] in ruling out alternative explanations and 2) often requires accepting some questionable premises. For unlawful fishing you have to first assume that members of every race breaking fishing laws at exactly the same rate [citation needed], but racist officers use their binoculars not just to count clams but to ascertain who to single out for arrest. Or maybe it's racist prosecutors writing up indictments who scan through the police reports and dump any with non-Cambodian names into the wastebasket. Or maybe a combination of both.
I cannot accept the "because racism" conclusion unless I see strong evidence supporting the above premises, and because I haven't seen this evidence, I have no reason to accept the conclusion. See how easy it was? But if I reject this proposed explanation, does that mean I have my own explanation for the disparity? Nope! And crucially, I don't need one. Some of the contraband shellfish quantities involved seem way too high for just personal consumption, and so we wondered if the motivation was selling their haul to some less-than-scrutinizing restaurants. Maybe word spread among the Cambodian community that this was an easy scheme with lagging enforcement. Maybe they lacked the cultural understanding that a government would ever be interested in stopping you from picking up natural bounty off the ground. Or maybe individuals within the O-M122 haplogroup carried a particular genetic mutation which made them unable to resist the siren song of free clams on the beach.
I can't imagine anyone would ever endorse that last explanation, it's deliberately absurdist. The point stands; I don't need to hitch my wagon to any particular alternative explanation to reject the "because of racism" one, all I need to reject a theory is its own lack of supporting evidence.
Genetic Destiny
Genetics are extremely consequential. Our chromosomes hold an unyielding and elaborate blueprint that govern not just an overwhelming of who we are, but also of who our lineage could be eons into the future. Humans certainly exhibit a remarkable adaptability across a dizzying spectrum of environments and circumstances, and our infinitely more malleable cultural memetic evolution deserves credit for turbocharging our advancement beyond the confines of our languorous flesh and blood. But this demonstrable flexibility can never refute the harsh unyielding control our DNA commands over certain domains. If your assembly instructions includes a third copy of chromosome 21, you will have Down syndrome and, however much we might wish otherwise, no amount of nurture will ever reverse that nature. Such is life.
Just like any other organism subject to natural selection, humans exhibit differences from each other on a multitude of heritable traits. Evolution cannot occur without variability after all, and sometimes you end up with agglomerated clusters. For example, the sickle cell gene is highly prevalent among populations from Sub-Saharan Africa because it provided a protective advantage against malaria, which just so happens to be best transmitted by mosquitos, which just so happens to favor tropical regions, which just so happens to advantage higher melanin levels for UV protection in humans. Through this complex chain of coincidental correlations, you end up with the fact that having black skin is highly predictive of sickle cell anemia risk.
That humans exhibit physical differences, across both short and long timescales (whether lactose tolerance within 10 thousand years or bipedalism across 4 million years), is tediously and trivially true. But there's absolutely no reason to believe that the same natural selection process that created such physical diversity would somehow treat mental traits as untouchable. Or as they say, evolution is not relegated to only from the neck down.
The Pretextual Charade
Acknowledging the undeniable reality that humans exhibit biological diversity is the weakest and least controversial definition of what is euphemistically called human biological diversity, or HBD for short. There's nothing ever wrong — neither in principle nor in practice — with studying the kaleidoscope that is the human genome and documenting any apparent patterns. The problem is that the HBD label attracts roughly two different camps of devotees with wildly divergent aims.
One camp is best exemplified by my old economics professor and friend Bryan Caplan. Caplan is a principled libertarian and an earnest academic who believes that IQ is highly heritable and enormously consequential, beliefs that I myself hold just as fervently. Setting aside how amorphous and arbitrary racial categories are, I also believe there's likely some relationship between certain racial groups and average [insert your favorite cognitive trait].[2] The other camp is best described by Caplan himself:
Go down deep enough the HBD rabbit hole and you'll easily encounter extended mythology about how members of the white race on average are genetically predisposed towards everything from being on time to meetings, to democracy. Start with an arbitrarily-designated geographic line that is putatively about female nuptiality, but also more-or-less fits your list of favored European stock (sorry Ireland) and there's no shortage of just-so stories that you can assemble by spotting associations through Vaseline-smeared spectacles.[3]
But let's assume the truth of the most extreme version of the above: white people on average are better on every relevant conceivable metric that is conducive to a thriving society. Now what? The fixation on group averages rather than individual merit remains baffling.
Consider how the average male is undeniably significantly stronger than the average female. But while sex is indeed highly predictive of physical strength, it isn't determinative and inevitably some females will be stronger than some males. If you were screening for a job that required the ability to lift 100lbs, screening for "men only" would for sure be better than picking candidates at random, but it also means turning down the female powerlifter and ending up with a guy with cerebral palsy.
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? The biggest practical point in favor of testing IQ directly is that while it no doubt remains politically unpopular within certain circles, there's no universe where "let's just ban countries with low average IQ" isn't even more unpopular. Setting that aside, could the blanket prohibition option potentially be justified on cost concerns? The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) is the most widely used IQ test and costs around $100-$400 and takes 2 hours to administer. Meanwhile, the cheapest and most straightforward legal immigration pathway to the US is the K-1 Fiancé visa, which costs $675 just to submit an application. So I've seen nothing to substantiate this cost excuse.
Anytime anyone insists on a low-resolution filter when it has no conceivable benefits compared to a high-resolution filter, you can conclude an unspoken motivation is at play. HBD offers a convenient mantle to don for any bog standard textbook racists looking for pretextual (read: fake) justification to hide what is fundamentally an aesthetic disgust they're too timid to be honest about.
The Omnipresent Allergy
If racial group averages shouldn't ever be used as the basis for policies, can raising their salience serve any other purpose? Nathan Cofnas is another "IQ realist" who openly acknowledges HBD's tarnished association:[5]
Despite that, Cofnas argues the race & IQ chorus needs to be amplified because he thinks it's the only way to refute the Blank Slate ideology that has been the foundation of "because racism" progressive ideology. Dickie Hanania — definitely no stranger to the HBD arena — pointed out several problems with Cofnas's mission which I echo completely, but I'll add an even bigger hurdle: Progressives are already viciously allergic to accepting the conclusions that naturally flow from their own worldview. I'll explain.
If you accept the institutional racism framework, various downstream effects must inevitably follow. If you believe that black mothers are systematically denied adequate prenatal medical care (because of doctors' unreceptiveness to complaints from black patients, geographic disparities in healthcare facility locations, implicit bias in medical training, and general economic barriers to accessing care) then wouldn't you expect this racism to cause problems? If you believe that black families are disproportionally impacted by environmental racism (because polluting industrial facilities and toxic waste dumps are predominantly located near black neighborhoods due to historical zoning and discriminatory policies) then same question, wouldn't you expect this racism to cause problems?
I don't know about you guys but in my naive understanding of the world, I would fully expect pollution and poor medical care to Cause Bad Things™️, including any number of lifelong intellectual disabilities and behavioral disorders. You would think that acknowledging the problems that your proposed policy would solve would be the easiest thing in the world, but progressives consistently exhibit a very bizarre combination of presenting racial minorities as both uniquely victimized and materially unaffected. Freddie deBoer observed the same dynamic on the other side with affirmative action:
If institutional racism doesn't create any material disadvantages to minorities...what does it do? If you can't get progressives to admit that the thing they hate the most causes problems, in what world would you think they'll be more receptive to messengers uncomfortably associated with reviving the Fourth Reich?
IQ is real, genetics matter, and progressives are not going to be reasoned out of an ideology they didn't reason into. The way to jettison the Blank Slate fallacy isn't to dust off the racial group averages stats that are pretextually obsessed about by bona fide racists. Theories that lack evidence should die for exactly that, lacking evidence. To the extent there is a taboo against asking the "because racism" crowd to show receipts, break it.
[1] How ironic.
[2] I even hold the rare honor of literally having been physically assaulted by a particularly deranged heckler in public, who was furious that I expressed this belief in response to a question. Those who know know.
[3] The "woke" identarian left makes identical claims but uses an oppression framework as the scaffolding rather than genetics, and is the other side of the exact same coin.
[4] Ok in fairness it was a Buzzfeed quiz and the result I got was Jasmine, but we all can read between the lines and know what it really meant.
[5] Cofnas is still a soft collectivist about racial affinity, writing in the same piece: "That does not mean that I advocate colorblindness or multiculturalism, or say that race is politically irrelevant. A race is like an extended family (although you'll probably be disappointed if you expect your racial brethren to treat you that way), and it's natural to care about the fate of your people. Our physical and psychological nature reflects our racial heritage, and for partly biological reasons we may feel a connection to our cultural traditions."
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