ymeskhout
3hr 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
5hr 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
5hr 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
5hr 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
6hr 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
19hr ago
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:
In my experience, if a stranger brings up low IQ in Africa, there's about a 50/50 chance he casually transitions to forced sterilization or mass murder of hundreds of millions of human beings as an intriguing response.
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]
Most self-identified "race realists" are not actually realists, but below-average-intelligence JQ (Jewish Question) obsessives whose beliefs have little to do with science. Virtually every genuine scholar of race is one or (at most) two degrees of separation removed from deranged crackpots and neo-Nazis, which makes it difficult for intellectually responsible outsiders to know whom to listen to.
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:
Lately though I am confused about how progressive people talk about affirmative action. It's come to be considered offensive to say that affirmative action recipients have enjoyed a material advantage, as doing so delegitimizes their successes and implies that they would not succeed without special consideration.
The question is, if affirmative action programs don't provide a material advantage to minority applicants... what do they do? The entire premise and purpose of affirmative action is to provide a material advantage to minority applicants. What could it mean to say that an affirmative action program does not provide benefits to minority applicants? If they don't do so, they don't exist. This stance is not just self-defeating, it's self-erasing.
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."
ymeskhout
19hr 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
21hr 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.
ymeskhout
2d 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
2d 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.
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
2d 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
3d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d ago
Having now read more of the entry, I agree the article is fine as a starting point. I vaguely knew about the Hajnal line map, but my limited familiarity made the lines seem arbitrary to me, and I didn't know it stemmed from particular marriage patterns.
ymeskhout
4d 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
29d ago
ymeskhout
1mo ago
Very rarely, yes, though keep in mind that my caseload isn't representative. The main one that comes to mind was a wheelchair-bound veteran with 0 criminal record who conducted a citizen's arrest using his (legal) gun but got the wrong people. The people he pointed a gun at were literally begging the police at the scene to not arrest him because they understood it was an innocent mistake on his end. I poked enough holes in the state's case that they offered a misdemeanor plea deal with no jail time, down from a serious firearm violent felony. I really didn't want him to take the deal, but he knew it was too risky to chance it at trial.
ymeskhout
1mo ago
I've listened to enough of Marcel's jail calls to know how quickly he can switch from complete charmer to "I will end you if you fuck me over" side when he was talking to his women, and I have to assume he got that back from when he used to be a pimp in his early days. I also watched him represent himself during a trial and he had hands-down the apogee of public speaking confidence. Absolutely rock-solid and unfazeable, despite no beta-blockers and lots at stake. He fit enough traditional alpha male checkboxes that it wasn't completely surprising.
ymeskhout
1mo ago
It's seriously astonishing how much rizz some of my clients have. While incarcerated, Marcel garnered up an endless list of new girlfriends (almost all of whom had no criminal record and had steady respectable jobs) who would show up to his pointless court hearings and even email/call court staff when things weren't going his way.
Regression to the mean is undeniably real and conclusively proven, I'm not disputing that. It can happen as fast as within one generation but it's more reliably observed the more generations you sample. What I described as hypothetical was limited to 1) whether this immigrant was going to have any kids at all and 2) assuming they did, in which direction and at what magnitude would any regression take place in their kids. It's possible for children to have an IQ higher than their parents', lower but still higher than the national average, or lower than both their parent's and the average.
You don't have to take anyone. My proposal is only relevant for people who are against immigration because of low-IQ concerns. If you have other reasons to oppose immigration, then clearly my proposal is of no relevance.
It's only a strawman if I'm mischaracterizing someone's position. My criticism only applies to those whose position matches my description of "insists on a low-resolution filter when it has no conceivable benefits". If their position is different from what I have described, then clearly my criticism would not apply to them.
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