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Notes -
On disparate impact, prejudice, American civil rights law, and academic vs. lay definitions of words.
(Or, why HBD won’t save you.)
This is an adaptation of a couple of long replies I made to a mutual on Tumblr, relevant to some recent arguments made here. Specifically, how sophisticated academic and legal arguments can differ from the version that trickles out through journalism and politics into the general population, and how people misunderstand the post-Griggs “disparate impact” regime (further cemented by the 1991 civil rights act), which is at once less ridiculous and yet more extreme in its implications than many of its critics think.
I saw someone here recently characterize said doctrine as the idea that “if a process produces disparate impact, then someone somewhere must have done something discriminatory.” But this itself can mean very different things depending on how one defines “something discriminatory.” Are we referring to treating individuals differently, or to treating groups differently? At one end, you get a kind of unfalsifiable “blood libel” reminiscent of classic antisemitic tropes about Jewish “elite overrepresentation,” and at the other, you get a tautology.
A major of the problem is essentially a conflict over definitions; that too many people mean too many different things when they use terms like “racism.” So I’m going to go ahead and do the thing around these parts of “tabooing” the term to start with. Instead, I’m going to talk about two distinct things. First, there’s “invidious discrimination.” That is, discrimination motivated by racial prejudice and stereotypes — treating individuals differently due to their race (judging by “color of their skin” rather than “content of their character,” as it were); what most ordinary people, especially those on the center right or the older left, are thinking of when they think of “racism.” Then there’s “disparate impact” — the existence of statistical differences between racial and ethnic group outcomes.
The standard criticism of Griggs v Duke Power is that it came to the ridiculous conclusion that disparate impact is itself presumptively evidence of invidious discrimination by someone, somewhere, in the hiring process until proven otherwise. Not too long ago, I saw someone (I think it was on Tumblr) who argued that yes, this would be a stupid thing for a court to conclude… but that this is not, in fact, what the court found in that case. Instead, they essentially deferred (as the courts usually do) to the EEOC’s own understanding of their mission. And what was that? Remember, they are the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Well, what does equal opportunity mean in the context of employment? The answer the EEOC came to is, essentially, that “equal opportunity” means you are equally likely to be hired, which means that the rate at which a racial or ethnic group gets hired should be roughly in proportion to their prevalence in society. That is, anything which makes blacks less likely to be hired constitutes a lack of equal opportunity. That using an IQ test results in disparate impact is itself the problem. It doesn’t matter why. it doesn’t matter that the employer has no discriminatory intent. It doesn’t matter whether or not the makers of the IQ test had any racist stereotypes or ideas about blacks, conscious or unconscious. It could well be because blacks just have lower IQs. That last is not an excuse for hiring blacks less, it is simply an explanation as to how and why IQ tests deny blacks equal employment opportunity. All that matters, for the purpose of civil rights law, is that if it causes a minority group to be less likely to be hired on average, it is presumptively forbidden (unless proven absolutely essential).
To go back to “something discriminatory,” the argument is that a thing is racially discriminatory if it produces statistically distinct outcomes for different racial groups — that is, it gives rise to disparate impact. As I said before, with this definition, “if a process produces disparate impact, then someone somewhere must have done something discriminatory” becomes a tautological statement.
This is very much in line with the academic consensus. Ibram X. Kendi makes it quite clear in his glossaries, when he defines racism and anti-racism in terms of racial equity and racial inequity, which he in turn essentially defines in terms of disparate impact. That is, “anti-racism” is anything which narrows or eliminates disparate impact. And anything that doesn’t — that is, not only things which increase disparate impact, but anything that maintains it — is racist. Invidious discrimination is, ultimately, irrelevant.
Back when I used to do some math and physics blogging on Wordpress over a decade ago, I’d occasionally get crank comments about some piece of jargon which also has a different meaning in colloquial usage, and how consequently, physicists or mathematicians are “using the word wrong” and need to stop. I don’t quite recall the math examples (except that one was in group theory), but for physics, the most memorable example was the angry comments holding forth the position that “you can’t taste quarks” therefore speaking of “flavors” of quarks is wrong, and physicists must stop. I’m pretty sure there are also words whose usage as legal terms differ in important ways from the layman’s ordinary usage.
No, the experts are not going to change their established terminology to assuage the linguistic prescriptivism of random cranks asserting the absolute supremacy of lay definitions.
To an ordinary person for whom the term “racism” refers primarily to invidious discrimination and prejudice, statements like “colorblind racism” and “you can be prejudiced against white people, but can’t be racist against them” (I remember someone giving a quote to this effect from the show “Dear White People”) make no sense. Which implies that those making such statement are using a different definition (particularly the latter statement). If instead, you define “racism” as meaning disparate impact, then those become quite straightforward, even obvious. Does “colorblindness” reduce or maintain differences in racial outcomes? Note that ignoring a thing seldom makes it go away. Does issuing covid vaccines on racial lines increase or decrease the white-black gap in health outcomes? (This last example remains perhaps the biggest “red flag” issue for my mutual.) Does openly discriminating against whites, asians, and jews (my mutuals go-to acronym here is JAW, in contrast to BIPOC) make the aggregate outcome differences between them and BIPOC bigger or smaller?
As one can see from the likes of Kendi, this latter is the academic definition, the term as used by the technical “experts” in the field. Further, if you buy the argument about Griggs, it’s also the legal definition — the definition used by the people who enforce civil rights law and policies “against racism.” And just like with quark flavors, you, the random layman, are not going to get them to change. Yes, one can argue that the term “racism” carries serous moral and legal weight in the way “flavor” does not, that definitional mismatch about such an emotionally-loaded term allows way too much “strategic equivocation” and other such games to let pass, and that a rectification of names is needed, but even then one shouldn’t expect the lay definition of the masses to win out over the elite definition.
One can also assert that the original intent of the civil rights law that created this system was to eliminate invidious discrimination, not to eliminate disparate impact, but this is disputed. (For example, Tim Wise does so here: “No, Precious, No One “Changed” the Meaning of Racism.”) In particular, there was a narrative in the early days that held that disparate impact was fully downstream from invidious discrimination, thus allowing the conflation of the two definitions of “racism.” If one did care more about ending disparate impact itself, well, then banning invidious discrimination was still the way to go about solving it. Except, of course, it was becoming clear by the time of Griggs that this didn’t hold. That eliminating Jim Crow and making things “colorblind” wouldn’t fully close the gaps. Hence the definition split.
(IIRC, it was @Hoffmeister25, either here or at the old place, who said that, in his experience as a white left-winger talking to blacks about these sorts of issues, American blacks were indeed mostly this latter set. That, to the extent they signed on to “colorblindness,” it was because they thought it would fully solve the outcome gap — which was always what they really cared about — and once it became clear that it wouldn’t do that, they increasingly moved on in search of something that would.)
I believe it is in Stamped from the Beginning that Kendi specifically addresses and rejects this narrative. Racist ideas do not produce racist institutions, he has argued, but instead it’s the other way around. Our institutions result in disparate outcomes between races — have done so since the first blacks arrived in any notable numbers in Western societies (hence “from the beginning”) — and people come up with ideas to explain it, and when those ideas propose that the “problem” to be “fixed” lies somewhere with the underperforming minorities themselves, rather than the system, those are racist ideas.
Earlier in the original Tumblr thread, the other party said the following:
…
This is where that example, and the Ozempic analogy comes in. Because that method of addressing different life outcomes between “thin” and “fat” treats obesity as the thing to be fixed, not that the obese have different outcomes. Sure, this might be okay to hold in the case of something like obesity — but even then, note my past comments, here and here, on Carleton University's Fady Shanouda attacking said medication as "fatphobia”, even "the elimination of fat bodies”, and “that treatments for "the so-called obesity epidemic" were "steeped in fat-hatred.”” But for people like Kendi, it’s never okay in the case of racial groups.
It’s like the stupid “positive action/self-esteem” shit we got in elementary school, about how “you’re fine just the way you are" (even back then, I knew that I was in some way broken and defective). It doesn’t matter if you think the “problem” is inborn, or cultural (the classic black conservative ‘stop listening to the rap music, get married and adopt bourgeois norms’ position), it’s still a racist idea if it holds that underperforming groups aren’t “fine just the way they are.”
Years ago, left-wing mixed-race HBD blogger Jayman was making pretty much the same argument, even as he asserted that the outcome gaps were almost entirely genetic. It’s the duty of society, he argued, to perpetually redistribute from the genetic “haves” to the genetic “have-nots” along racial lines, until racial equity is achieved. Genetic engineering to fix those genetic have nots — even of the IVF with genetic screening kind — is “Nazi stuff.” (My mutual is very bullish on these technologies.) Crime rate differences between races are because blacks are genetically predisposed to crime… and therefore it’s not their fault, and the solution is to punish blacks less often and less harshly for the same criminal acts as whites, until their fraction of the prison population matches their fraction of the general population. Yes, it means white people accepting continuing victimization by black criminals — at one point in HBDChick’s comments section, Jayman described the contemporary situation as a “one-sided race war” by blacks against JAWs… and then asserted that “a two-sided war is always worse” than a one-sided war.
Other writings of his in a similar vein point to a couple of analogies — mine, not his. First, the classic injunction that a man must never hit a woman… even if she’s hitting him, first. He can try to gently restrain her, but otherwise, he’s obligated to stand there and take it… because he’s stronger and she’s weaker. Even more extreme, but also more broadly accepted: if you’re an adult, and a small child throwing a tantrum is pounding on your leg with their tiny fists, you definitely aren’t allowed to “hit them back,” no matter what. You stand there and take it because you can take it, and hitting back would do far, far more damage. Cue classic “when white people riot” meme with pictures of the Third Reich. BIPOC, due to their ‘genetic disprivilege,’ can’t do as much damage as JAWs can, and JAWs can also collectively *absorb( more attacks thanks to their ‘genetic privilege.’ Thus, they have a duty to “stand there and take it” with regards to racialized wealth redistribution, racialized vaccine distribution, or random subway shovings, and just as any adult man who “hits back” against a woman or a child is a brute, any white person who won’t simply accept this sort of thing as the price of their superior genes is a racist Klansman Nazi who will be dealt with accordingly. The goal is, as with Kendi, to ensure statistically equal outcomes for racial groups as they currently exist, and anyone who opposes that is racist.
Now, plenty of people have called for changes to current civil rights law to address this definitional issue and change things “back” to fighting invidious discrimination rather than fighting disparate impact. But the proposals won’t work, because they tend to miss how we got here. I think it was Chris Rufo who, while holding up Nixon of all people as the example to follow, called for the creation of a new Federal task force to track down and punish “anti-white discrimination” in the institutions. Given the nature of how people are hired for Federal bureaucracies, the nature of our credential-issuing institutions, and such, just who will end up running said institution in the long run?
I also recall reading recently about a British think-tank created in the wake of the Rotherham scandal to specifically address Islamic radicalization and lack of assimilation. Why were they being brought up? Because their most recent action was to release a book list with a warning of ‘if someone you know is reading these books, they may be on the path of radicalization to becoming a white supremacist.’ The list included works by Orwell, CS Lewis, and a book on the Rotherham scandal. So this institution, despite its founding mission, has decided that the real problem they need to fight is ‘Islamophobic white supremacy’ amongst the native British population.
Personnel is policy. The same thing applies with attempts to “repeal and replace” civil rights law to “get back” (again, see Tim Wise) to the lay “racism=discrimination” definition and away from the academic “racism=disparate impact” definition. Laws are but words on a page unless they’re enforced. And no matter how much we might say “this time when we say ‘fighting discrimination’ we really mean fighting discrimination, including against white people, not “disparate impact,”’ so long as the people who interpret and enforce it are the same bunch as we have now — who all belong to the same academic consensus understanding as to what what “racism” is and what their mission to fight it means — you’re going to keep getting the same results as we do now. And there is no (peaceful, legal) mechanism to replace that personnel.
Now, why does this matter? The answer to that question seems to be ‘because we (for certain elite values of “we”) have come to recognize (i.e. have decided) that it is our biggest issue and highest moral priority as a society, in keeping with the fundamental value of Equality, and, perhaps more importantly, have enshrined this into our law. And why have our elites chosen to define “racism” this way? Well, first there’s all the cynical, power-seeking and power-maintaining reasons for doing so. But even that tends to give way under “generational loss of hypocrisy.” To quote @WhiningCoil:
Thus, many of them probably actually believe it. Why? Well, because, as noted above, it’s what they and all their peers were taught (without “getting the joke” as it were), and it’s what their peer groups enforce as the moral consensus. But also because it fits with Haidt’s “moral foundations.” For people whose moral foundations are based primarily around the “fairness” axis, with the “care/harm” axis as the only other one in their worldview, appeals to “equity” will always have the strongest effect. (See also Moldbug’s “Puritan hypothesis.”)
One may or may not be familiar with the ultimatum game? (If not, I’d recommend take a moment to read about it.) Even though, in terms of one’s personal outcomes, it’s always rationally preferred to take a non-zero split no matter how unfair, most human beings are indeed willing to pay a price in lost opportunity to “punish” a (positive-sum) outcome they find too “unfair.” And, per Haidt, some people are far more sensitive to “unfairness” than others Some people would reject a $51/$49 split. Some might reject a $501/$499 split.
It’s why appeals to aggregate well-being — like in the fatness example, about how redistributing healthcare to equalize lifespans for fit-vs-fat (as opposed to treating the latter with Ozempic) will lead to a net loss of aggregate life-years — tend not to work. Because plenty of people care more about the relative distribution than the absolute aggregate. They see equitable destitution as morally preferable to fabulous prosperity even slightly unequally distributed. In their view, making people worse off in absolute terms is good if it also makes them more equal. This is a matter of terminal goals and moral axioms.
This also appeals to one of humanity’s worst tendencies: envy. Not just wanting what other people have (and you don’t have), but resenting those who have more than you. If your primary drive is that nobody ever have more than you do, then views centering “equity” like this allow you to portray your envy and resentment as moral virtue, which makes those views more attractive than alternatives that don’t.
I hope this helps clarify why the whole “HBD as counter to disparate impact” argument won’t really work. Even if you convince people “blacks have genetically lower average IQs,” or whatever, then you’ve only just explained why IQ tests are racist — because blacks deserve to be hired at proportional rates despite the lower average IQ. And so on. Under the currently-dominant framework of our society, it doesn’t matter how much biology contributes, if any, to current inequality, it is still our legal and moral duty to change “the system” in whatever ways necessary to produce equitable outcomes despite it. The established institutions of our society — government, academia, media, NGOs, etc. — are filled top-to-bottom with true believers who hold this as a terminal value, and it’s not going away until they all do (which is a problem, because there’s no voting them out).
On August 12th of 2023, I made a post criticizing Hitler's behavior, titled Re: The National Body, based on Bryan Caplan's reading of Hitler's book indicating an ideological system that believes in the inevitability of Malthusian total war. In a later post on February 24th of 2024, responding to an anon that said I came off as New Right, in addition to describing a 2x2 matrix of outcomes for genetic engineering, I also wrote,
There are some reasons to believe that the force of envy, which is as old as humanity, will overwhelm the ability of the production system to sustain itself, and the political ability of the defenders of the production system to protect that system. However, treating that as a certainty makes little sense.
Until very recently, it was effectively not possible to alter genes in an adult. This meant that, effectively, the only tool available was reproductive coercion. Acknowledging that a problem was genetic meant that it was "unsolvable," and that suffering was "inevitable." Because the use of reproductive coercion was so obvious, an elaborate system was set up to suppress information about genetics... but despite this, the study of genetics continued.
Current liberal responses to the use of genetic engineering technology are tainted by the belief that the technology is "science fiction" and may never arrive, and thus someone proposing it may be engaging in discursive maneuvering to "trick" the liberal into supporting human suffering with a fake hypothetical.
We don't actually know how influential liberals will respond when the technology arrives for more than just a handful of monogenic diseases. The idea that they will completely oppose the technology is an assumption, not a fact.
And perhaps more importantly, you never present a solid alternative course of action, and I do not, in fact, have anything better to do.
This gets toward one of our differences: I don't share your technological optimism, particularly when it comes to the economics. This idea that once something is technologically possible, it will become broadly affordable within some reasonably short timeframe (due to ongoing "progress")… well, when is the inevitable progress of ever-cheaper technology going to make supersonic passenger flight economical?
Sure, but one can extrapolate from the evidence, and, more importantly, it's not the "influential liberals" (to the extent there even are any left) that we need to worry about, it's the much more influential illiberal left that's the issue.
This is a perennial frustration of mine, interacting with people online, this idea that criticism of a proposed plan of action is inherently invalid unless the critic can present a fully-fleshed superior alternative. Like, an architect has a proposal for a new, record-setting suspension bridge to be built across some span of water. He's got blueprints, and cost estimates, and everything. Except, you look at it, and it's all missing the cables from which the road bed is meant to be suspended. If you point this out to him, and that his bridge is going to collapse without them, and he responds "well, where's your proposed bridge? Where are your blueprints, your budgets? You don't have any? Well, then your criticism is therefore invalid, and my bridge will hold up just fine!" What do you say to that?
Your proposed course of action is, if I understand it, is to buttress liberalism against the illiberal "woke" left long enough for these technologies to become broadly available and obviate the political issues, right? Except, your means for doing so is, what, voting Republican? That's the part I primarily object to, and where I keep pushing the "and if that don't work?" questions your way.
I'm not discussing most other plans at this time.
In the meantime, the mainblog will soon be shutting down for a six-month hiatus.
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Here is an example of this type of thinking:
My understanding of the issue is that children of all families are overreported to family services, and the lawyer group STOP recognizes that the process is the punishment ; getting investigated by the government is stressful, getting your kids taken away by the government is a nightmare.
Charitably, one can imagine that they are trying to ride the DEI wave to reduce the absolute number of families unfairly targeted by nosy teachers, neighbors, medical workers, etc. Perhaps they are hoping that whatever findings they come up with while trying to reduce the comparative overreporting of 'Black, Latino and Indigenous families' can then be generalized to everybody... Or they simply don't care about the non-'Black, Latino and Indigenous families' that are also suffering through this system.
Another way to resolve the problem of 'overreporting our people' would be to start reporting non-'Black, Latino and Indigenous families' more often to equalize the rates between groups... That would definitely not be a good outcome imo.
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The argument that we must continuously discriminate in favor of less able groups because we already have the precedent of disability payments and similar redistributions in favor of less fortunate makes sense at first, but actually doesn't if you ponder it.
Yes, ADA demands that businesses bear additional costs to makes their premises accessible to less-able people and it's a popular law. Disability payments help people maintain a standard of living that would be unattainable otherwise. Even getting extra time for your SAT test is already controversial enough, and no one demands that we have quadriplegic firefighters or narcoleptic air traffic controllers in the name of fairness. Boosting people who suffer from much less debilitating conditions of poor impulse control, limited working memory and short attention span beyond people who've been dealt a much worse hand by life when Medicaid, Section 5 housing and food stamps already exist seems completely irrational to me.
Not yet, we don't. But give it time…
Yes, but you're not one of the people in charge.
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This is the first explanation that makes sense to me about systemic racism - that it's about disparate impact. That does finally clear up a lot of confusion.
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Good post but I don't think your conclusion follows. Yes, obviously much of politics is just personality differences such as some vibesy favoring of equity over gross outcomes but facts do in fact matter. I believe politics would look radically different if HBD was mainstreamed for two reasons.
First, in the early 20th century it was mainstream, and the sort of eugenics that anti-HBDers now use as a boogeyman was popular among elites. The cause of this was the popularization of evolution as an idea, which most people just assumed meant HBD. I don't see why a similar thing can't happen again. As I've also argued here, there are HBD arguments for all the positions that progressives favor, but that doesn't mean that those arguments would be made or would be as convincing to as many people as the ones currently being made. This ties in to my second reason for being bullish on HBD prompting political alignment: talking to people. Your one example of the HBD left wing blogger is a funny exception to the rule, can you talk to regular progressives or even just normal people and really believe they would just pivot on a dime to using HBD arguments to justify the same positions? I'm sure some would, but without magic dirt arguments like food deserts, lead poisoning, systemic racism, underfunded schools etc. do you really think the American public would support the hard and soft racial spoils systems we have in place? My impression is that they decidedly would not and most simply hold views based on false premises. Their views would change even by being aware of entry-level racial differences in, say, crime. Most people are remarkably unaware of the reality of race despite how important an issue it is. Part of the reason the system even exists is because it isn't talked about in the mainstream, look at the SFFA case and the casuistry employed by some of our most decorated academics to lie about what Harvard's admissions were doing. Obviously they lie because AA is on shaky legal ground, but they also lie in op-eds and, as far as I can tell, to themselves. Why would they do this if the facts didn't matter?
On a less bullish note, your post reminded of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and specifically his reference to Planck's principle. The sad truth is that to get people to accept a new idea, especially the elites who have really committed themselves to an old idea, is not easy. Kuhn makes the point that the strength of the respective evidence for competing paradigms doesn't seem to explain which is adopted. Likewise for explanatory power. Science and politics are obviously different, but I think in neither does the marketplace of ideas actually work. A good model for how politically inconvenient facts are adopted is the AIDs epidemic, read this thread if you want the long version. Quite early, there was evidence that gay sex and hyperpromiscuity were behind the spread of the mysterious disease, but many in the gay community refused to change their habits. There were op-eds written saying that there was no evidence and that those trying to shut down the bathhouses were really trying to shut down gay sexuality etc. Eventually, when the evidence became overwhelming, this denial was whitewashed with the narrative of it being the government's fault. This suggests that if HBD is adopted by elites in my lifetime it will be done quietly, there will be some narrative excusing why it wasn't adopted earlier, and most normal people will be continue to be unaware. Despite this pessimism, I still think that if HBD were popularized, politics would drastically change.
No, but what the American public does or does not support is irrelevant. So long as the ruling elites support the spoils system, they'll cram it down Americans' throats whether they like it or not.
I don't think "the marketplace of ideas" works well at all — it selects not for truth, but mimetic virulence. Which is one of the many reasons I remain generally opposed to democracy.
While I agree that there is the danger that popular opinion can be hijacked by untruthful, even malignant (but nevertheless popular) ideas, I would ask what your alternative to democracy would be? The marketplace of rhetoric and mentalizing the public may select for what you're calling "mimetic virulence" but I don't think that's true for ideas. Isn't the problem rather that ideas are suppressed?
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The academics write books for the lay people and don’t make these points and are perfectly fine letting the layman think what they mean is the bad vernacular racism. I feel like Feynman would have a field day with an academic writing in ways that no one understands what their meaning and consider these academics you are referring to as idiots. We are also NOT talking about how physicists talk about physics amongst themselves but how sociologists talk to the general public.
This system just doesn’t work. It just means people need to find a way to redefine themsleves as the oppressed group. Which for the way you’re talking about this we do see the results you would expect from this theory. We do in fact have lgbtqihdtv++ or whatever it is now. And fake native Americans. And we of course could never just have BIPOC (or whatever it is now) but would need to have 100 flavors of Asian and white etc. Which for equal representation would never work having 100 Supreme Court Justices so no sub group of sub group is left out.
Even thinking about these things makes my hard hurt and it just feels simpler to remove these people from society. They really do turn me into a dictator supporting right-winger and the easiest solution seems to be just to put them all in jail. Then the normies and the meritocracy and everything that made America great can keep doing it’s thing.
As I keep saying to the Tumblr mutual who prompted the original thread, "work" is a goal-dependent term. Does it work to hold together the left's "coalition of the fringes"? Does it work to keep these people in power? Does it work to carve out employment niches and sinecures for the people who promote and parrot these narratives? Does it work in allowing the young up-and-comers of our overproduced elites to "eliminate" their rivals in the competition for the limited number of PMC jobs? Does it work as a bludgeon with which to beat the enemy party, tribe, or class?
I hear you.
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The point of HBD is to get rid of the currently dominant framework in society. Normative equality with factual inequality is ridiculous. Most would agree that the idiot/drug-dealer/robber deserves worse outcomes than the Nobel prize winning family man.
The current system pretends that 'investing' in lower quality people will increase their quality. If we shuffle around welfare policies and make more investments, we'll eventually have everyone be really high quality and it will all be harmonious and great. Of course there are various ethnic resentments and greed that really motivate things but officially, that's what the explanation is. That's the source of legitimacy.
HBD explains why the investment doesn't work. It shows that you might make marginal changes on the edges but that fundamentally low-quality populations will remain low-quality. It shows that there's no end to this 'investment', that it's actually a tax on efficiency, meritocracy and society generally. Prosocial people might pay for an investment to improve all of society but few are going to throw money down the drain when it's guaranteed not to work and actually creates problems. The beginning of blankslatism was founded on scientific fraud for this very reason - they fiddled with the figures of skull measurements so it looked like their opponents were lying, evil racists. First you establish the facts, then you explain how your policy solves the problem, then you purge the old guard of nonbelievers, then you implement it.
HBD will show the danger in taxing the most capable while subsidizing the least capable. I know a bunch of really clever, productive people - zero children, one child, zero children, two children... Very few have more than three. Meanwhile you see single mothers on welfare with a brood of children, statistically of much lower quality. Consider how sex and reproduction are considered among society's elite. Sabatini was this genius researcher with one son who's been impoverished and excluded from his work because he dared have consensual sex with a woman. HBD would say we need lots of this, that the best should be reproducing the most. https://www.thefp.com/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cancer-researcher?s=w
Blankslatism is a huge drain on group efficiency, understanding HBD increases efficiency. Even if blankslatist ideology can't be voted out, it does go against the structure of the universe. Those groups that are less blankslatist will get a competitive advantage. If we don't vote it out, then the Chinese army will. If not them, then some other force.
Reading the linked story, it's a little more complicated than that. And basically demonstrates that the Pence Rule is not a bad idea, and fucking co-workers/colleagues is.
What the articles tells me is that getting women into science is simply not worth the trouble; each time some broad opens her piehole, we lose a luminary.
Can you imagine if this nonsense had been around while Richard Feynman was still alive?
You haven’t had a warning since September, but it was for the exact same ranting about women as a class.
Painting with that broad of a brush is still against the rules.
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As infamously expressed by Tim Hunt:
It doesn't strike me as a bad idea, but I don't actually want the Science to get any better. Best case scenario seems to me for diversity to cancel the AI apocalypse.
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Is his action the problem or is it the rule that's bad?
People should be allowed to have sex if they're coworkers without one party retrospectively deciding it was abuse and canning a top researcher. What was the point of all this sexual liberation/free love if it's only for anonymous strangers to have casual sex?
I think the woman who complained made a mountain out of a molehill, but she was also plainly hoping to boost her career by association with him. He didn't do that, plus he then was giving signs he was going to dump her for the German squeeze, hence the revenge accusation.
If he didn't realise all the way that an affair with a work colleague could go south, then I'm sorry for him, but he walked into this trap. He probably, by the sound of it, isn't too smart when it comes to relationships; he took up with the accuser when he was in the middle of divorcing his wife (this wasn't an affair), he never noticed the red flags over her having a string of guys on the go at the same time, and he seems to have thought she'd be just fine with him having another side piece and probably replacing her with that one.
He may not have deserved what happened to him, but women and men do not want the same thing out of sex. If he imagined that she was approaching sex like a guy, like him, as "fun casual thing with no deeper intentions", well now he knows different. I genuinely think "don't shit where you eat" is a good rule, particularly when it comes to 'office romances' because an ordinary love affair is bad enough when it goes sour, but something like this is ten times worse, as we can now see.
Now, if the pair of them had ended up getting married or in a "durable relationship" out of this, then okay. But he was looking for something no-strings-attached, assumed she was the same, and ignored or was not aware of the signals she was giving out.
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Given that the rules Sabatini violated include not only the Whitehead Consensual Sexual and Romantic Relationships Policy but also Exodus 20:14, and "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" and "Don't shit where you eat" form part of the Copybook Headings of Gnon, I don't think "Sabatini did nothing wrong" is a defensible position. You can defend "Geniuses should not be held to the same rules as plebs", but that fell out of fashion for good reasons after it became clear how much damage sociopathic elites could do by abusing it.
There wasn't any. Free love isn't. The only dispute is about whether Blue Tribers should doublethink this in order to avoid giving aid and comfort to the hated Red Tribe by straight up admitting it.
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@aqouta - apologies for the ping, but we were discussing HBD recently. What's your assessment of the argument he's making here?
No worries about a ping, it's good to have another context to continue from.
I think @RandomRanger drawing some conclusions from HBD that make sense if you add some other values like that society's purpose is to do something like maximize capabilities that I don't really hold, or at least don't strongly hold. You'll see they don't even mention race, this is just the Idiocracy argument.
It does seem like our heavy investments in educational interventions could at least be better spent even going to improve the lives to those they're trying to uplift if we were a little more realistic and separated out the most gifted students with impoverished backgrounds for tracks and gave the less talents of all races something like a comfortable life. It doesn't strike me as particularly compassionate to spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to teach less gifted students subjects that they aren't capable of. In fact that seems quite humiliating, it makes the failing more personal if we assume that they're capable but some personal failing is causing them to fall short. Those resources could go towards making sure they have adequate housing and that their neighborhoods are safe. There is no reason our less gifted can't lead dignified lives. I suspect that because of HBD those living dignified but not demanding lives will differ in racial proportions to those living impactful lives. I think it will probably have different proportions of red heads and heights as well for much the same reason.
As for @Capital_Room's longer post, I find it pretty unconvincing. Yes, I know that those people are obsessed with disparate outcomes. No, I don't think that this is reasonable justification for racial discrimination. It's just the argument for Harrison Bergeron given without candor.
Have you read Chris Arnade's Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America? It's a pretty good book, and this is one of its key points. (There's also some bits about getting help or services — particularly the passage about waiting rooms — that really resonated with my personal experiences.)
Except, of course, they don't need to convince you it's reasonable, they just have to have convinced EEOC bureaucrats, judges, DEI departments, and so on, and they'll force it on everybody whether you agree or not.
Speaking of which, I remember when we studied that in school, and the teacher argued that the titular character is actually the villain of the story, and that Handicapper General Diana Moon Glampers is meant to be the hero.
This is all technicality. We still live in a democracy, these people serve at our collective pleasure. All sorts of things have been the law carried out as written, been unjust and overthrown. Step one is to defeat the idea in the public arena, the rest follows.
And I disagree with both of these. Our "democracy" is a sham, and "these people" are fully insulated from the electoral process.
Then this conversation is pointless.
By "this conversation," do you mean you and I talking, or do you mean the entire discussion as to what motivates the "equity set"?
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Don't apologize for ping - we are amongst friends - if anything let's ping more
Which makes OP's vaguing @mitigatedchaos even more infuriating.
Personally, I think it's interesting to see how other people respond. He responds to my Tumblr posts in this manner quite regularly.
Trust me, I know, I'm the one who needled you into replying to his posts one time. I'm 99% on his side, I simply find those indirect references to you rude.
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Except that you're ignoring the likes of Jayman. He's quite cleat that it's not an "investment," it's compensation for the "low quality."
Again, he's quite open about this, that his proposals mean redistribution from genetic "haves" to "have-nots," and that it it will indeed never end. That is a perpetual moral obligation of JAWs to pay that "tax on efficiency, meritocracy and society generally" forever.
The argument is that, again, you will be forced, by legal and cultural pressure, to "throw money down the drain", because if you don't, you will be deemed a racist bigot and cast into the Outer Darkness. Punish dissent severely enough long enough, and you'll get people to cave.
Edit: Let me add the classic "equality vs. equity" cartoon, this version courtesy of the United Way. This is why your "blankslatism" vs. "understanding HBD" is irrelevant, because in the "equity" framework, the sources of the inequity don't matter. Even if the supposed "blankslatists" came to believe HBD instead, those biological differences become just one more thing to build and distribute metaphorical "boxes and ramps" to compensate for it. If genetics has left groups unequal, then society must make them equal. The problem isn't "blankslatism," it's equity.
Well, it's a good thing for the blankslatists that Jayman isn't in charge of their PR! Jayman is the exception, the general rule is that HBD people want to end the current system. I bet if you took the HBD community and asked them to choose between his 'infinite redistribution and one sided race war' or my 'end the tax', I'd enjoy an overwhelming majority of support. The only hbd people I know of who say this are Jayman (black) and Razib Khan (brown of some description).
Punishing dissent can paper over the cracks but Boeing needs to produce planes that don't fall apart. TSMC's ever-delayed plants in America need capable staff. Doing things correctly isn't a luxury, it's the grinding stone of competition. An equilibrium of eternal net-negative redistribution cannot hold. Either it gets voted out or it gets bombed into oblivion.
A relevant piece I read recently in The Hill: "DEI killed the CHIPS Act"
…
…
So, no, the people in charge are indeed willing to prioritize "equity" over having microchips.
There's a lot of ruin in a nation. The "fall of Rome" was a centuries-long decline only visible in hindsight; from within, it just seemed like a series of individual, unrelated crises. The Global American Empire is still the sole hegemon of our "unipolar" world order, and can remain on top for quite some time despite ongoing encrudification. If it can take down any major potential competitors while that still holds — ensure China "grows old before it grows rich" and collapses from its terrible demographics, grind down Russia until it breaks apart, et cetera — and uses its remaining power to spread the ideology to as much of humanity as possible, then there won't really be anyone really left outside the GAE to "bomb it into oblivion" even as it decays.
The article skirts around it, but almost all the actual DEI stuff is just filing “plans” and some more paperwork for bullshit job HR employees at corporate. Even the union training stuff was only implicitly critical. The main reason, which the article ignores, is surely just that a strong dollar and extremely high US salaries mean that moving the factories to Germany and Japan makes them much more economically viable.
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I can scarcely put into words my profound disappointment and heartbreak learning that the CHIPs act was killed by DEI bullshit.
I've been banging on for years now about the risk of Taiwan being invaded, or blockaded and smothered, by China. That the risk of TSMC being nationalized by China is so existential that it should be our number one priority. That we cannot possibly prevent China from eventually "unifying" with Taiwan, and the only possible solution is to do whatever it takes to have, preferably domestic, alternatives. I've thrown oodles of money into Intel due to this thesis, and plan on throwing oodles more. I might be talking out my ass, but I've put my money where my mouth is.
I honestly believed our government was taking this shit seriously with the CHIPs act. It was practically the singular glimmer of hope I had that the current administration wasn't content to just let people suffer and die en masse if it at least meant they weren't acting racist. I should have fucking known better. I really fucking should have.
God damnit.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-12/pentagon-scraps-plan-to-spend-2-5-billion-on-intel-chip-grant
Intel's been truly cucked by NVIDIA on the gains front. It's down over the last 5 years. Then again, my Lockheed Martin shares aren't doing so great either. I assumed the US would start making big munitions orders as the world heated up, they were my war hedge. But no...
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God damn it, indeed.
Even if I take your phrasing with a shaker of salt, I’m still disappointed in the politics being played.
From Wikipedia:
The whole wiki section on criticisms, of course, spends more time quoting the one commentator who didn’t think CHIPS favored unions enough.
It borders on parody. What can a man even do about this?
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@DaseindustriesLtd disproven again, there are no traces of any secret cabal keeping things under control. "Von Neumanns" are not in politics (and if they are, they are busy maneuvering to climb as high as possible and divert as much money and resources for themselves as possible).
As said Dominic Mckenzie Cummings, someone with extensive experience in government:
No God, no Caesar, no hero is going to save us, we are on our own.
Oh come on, this is more American whining. Muh deaths of overdoses, muh Russian election meddling, little old us assaulted on all fronts, won't somebody please spare a thought for the poor hegemon.
The CHIPS act has been about pork and the usual fighting over the spoils from the beginning, its success or failure is of no consequence. China was summarily cut off from modern semiconductor manufacturing and falls behind, new fabs in safe allied countries are being completed, Taiwan is getting reinforced, and AGI seems to be on schedule within 5 years. Yes, could have been done better. But it has gone well enough that advancing petty political agendas took precedence. If there ever is any plausible risk of the US losing control over the global high-end manufacturing chain, I am sure you'll see it going differently.
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The problem with Cummings was that he was the archetypal example of the stupid and ill-informed public school to Oxbridge humanities pipeline graduate who runs the British civil service, he just thought he could do a better job than his contemporaries after he failed to make money in 1990s Russia (itself a damning indictment given he was a moderately well-connected Englishman while the state was being comprehensively pillaged by many of his peers). Most of his ideas were the kind of ill-informed contrarianism that belongs at the Oxford Union, except that Cummings was so linked by his class hatred of men from better families who went to better or more reputable schools that he decided he would tear everything down to be replaced by his version of the same system that ruined everything.
His veneration is ridiculous. All of his good ideas were because he occasionally read a couple of good pieces in the SSC/rat/LWverse and possibly read some Moldbug (although clearly, clearly not enough). Cummings failed to understand that the problem was not that the people in charge were uniquely incompetent but that their incentives were mismatched with the improvement of the nation, and that he would have acted exactly the same if he had been in power (and indeed largely did when he was, as evidenced by his chaotic flipping on COVID and his ultra-pro-lockdown position contra Boris’ libertarianism, which was worse for the country than the decisions of the vast majority of Whitehall civil servants he so decried.
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IANAL but I've interviewed/hired a lot of people in a lot of firms in a very g-loaded industry and I don't think this is the right understanding of Griggs or employment law at all.
Disparate Impact doesn't mean that every test with a DI is downstream of invidious demonstration. What it does, AAIUI, is to shift the burden to the employer to demonstrate that the test has substantial relation to the actual duties of the job. That's why all my employers have very consistently made sure to relate everything in the interview process to specific aspects of the jobs, in a documented fashion. If you ask a candidate to solve a mathematical riddle, you make sure somewhere it's listed that "mathematical reasoning under uncertainty" is a job criterion. And if you're sued, you demonstrate where and how people with the job reason mathematically.
This is a bit of a middle ground. Certainly the burden-shifting nature of DI discourages a lot of otherwise cromulent practices merely out of a desire to reduce the risk of being sued and having to mount that kind of defense. But it's certainly quite far from the Kendi nonsense that every difference in outcome is itself discriminatory. It pleases neither contingent.
Which is sufficiently burdensome to basically ban such tests. Furthermore, if the plaintiff in such a case can suggest that there's a test which would accomplish the same goals without the disparate impact, he wins anyway -- and of course there's no way the employer can disprove the counterfactual suggested.
I have had to take a paper test for every job I’ve ever gotten, in a field that lots of blacks would like to get into but often don’t make it.
One or two? Whatever, things slip through the cracks. Industry standard? I doubt it.
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There exist legal means to replace a lot of them that do not inherently involve bloodshed. It's just that making such an attempt probably means they revolt.
I don't see them. I mean sure, on paper maybe, but none under the legal rules as actually practiced and enforced. Care to expand upon this?
Perhaps I might have used the wrong word when I said "legal"; I meant "with control of the legislature and without getting struck down by the courts as unconstitutional". Note also that I said "a lot", not "all".
This is trivial in Westminster systems like most of the Anglosphere has, so I won't belabor that point, and I don't know too much about the continental systems so I won't address that. As for the USA:
Replace civil service and public-school teachers: Repeal the Pendleton Act, and summarily fire all the ones who have made SJ-affiliated social media posts in the five preceding years (which is most of them). This leaves the problem of how to prevent that sort getting back in once they're aware that declaring allegiance to SJ in public is not such a good idea. Hiring rules that ignore qualifications from SJ-affiliated universities would help, a lot.
Replace academia: Obviously, repeal all the Civil-Rights-era law that forces DIE departments. That's the process. But there's also the question of how to deal with the existing academia, since outright banning Harvard wouldn't be constitutional. So, repeal student loans, with perhaps an exception for ideologically-appropriate universities (and to salt the earth, make wage garnishment for private student loans illegal so as to force market failure). And this synergises well with the above, in both directions.
Replace media: You can't dismantle the MSM without running into 1A problems. But there's a substantial alt-media ecosystem already. Some light incentives to raise its accuracy level, plus control of the schools, above, to point out to kids that the MSM is partisan should get things moving in the right direction. Maybe ban large social media sites, or smartphones, to cut down on that side of things.
Replace NGOs: Hard, because a lot of them won't die without government funding, but you can for the most part just stop listening to them.
I'm leaving aside "lawfare" tactics such as those currently being employed against the Right because they're of dubious constitutionality and execrable ethics, but in "would you get away with it" terms it might work. And of course, a lot of this would be pretty chaotic; omelette and eggs. But it wouldn't inherently involve bloodshed, it just would probably lead to revolts.
Note: Some of this I actually have ethical qualms about, and some more of it I'd avoid doing for the moment due to the civil war risk (although if such a civil war were to break out anyway, or if e.g. a nuclear war occurred and wiped out a lot of SJers, then I'd be more willing in the aftermath).
I'm not sure if it's worth the effort of going point by point as to why exactly none of these will work, but none of these will work. The courts will shut down any attempts. They'll figure out a way to rule that repealing the Pendleton Act is unconstitutional, or failing that, find a way to rule that firing for social media posts is somehow forbidden.
You can't get rid of all the "SJ-affiliated" civil service bureaucrats and public-school teachers, because that's practically all of them and there's not enough "non-woke" candidates to take their place. Abolishing college DEI departments and reforming financial aid won't do anything about the near-total lack of right-wing professors. There is no way to "fix" the political capture of American academia within the bounds of the law and the constitution — doing so will almost certainly require bloodshed.
I doubt this. The MSM simply has too many advantages over the not-so-substantial "alt-media ecosystem" to be defeated by the latter. Nothing will dislodge the left's control of the media megaphone except deliberate action by a right-wing government in blatant violation of the first amendment… or else something more extreme.
Which is why it will fail. These people's hold on power is so strong, so absolute, so insulated from democratic mechanisms, that I simply see no possible way to remove them from power except for killing them.
The teachers and the professors aren't really that big a deal. To fix the teacher problem, bring back the rubber roomers and drop most of the qualification requirements. Maybe cut school hours if there's still a shortage. There isn't really that big a professor problem, since there are plenty of non-SJer STEM professors (particularly if you seek out the ones that were politically purged) and letting political science/philosophy/history/literature/sociology lie fallow for a decade isn't the end of the world (we arguably want there to be less PS and sociology graduates). The bureaucrats are a bigger problem, but I think it's not completely insoluble. As I said, though, this is definitely a "move fast and break things" plan and would have some degree of chaos in the short-term.
I mean, I'm not disputing that that's the most likely way for the Blue Tribe to fall. My preferred grand strategy has been and continues to be "get out of cities, plan, and wait for nuclear war to wipe out most of the Blues", as I've noted several times on this site; this kind of root-and-branch would be much easier in a lot of ways with a drastically-reduced Blue Tribe.
I'm sure that in at least some states, courts could nix this via reference to the state constitution's education guarantee clause.
Except I don't think any such war is coming. So what's your "plan b" if it fails to materialize?
All the stars are basically aligned for the PRC to make a Taiwan play in the near future, and that probably means nuclear exchange.
Me personally? Don't have one, would rather lose than go even as far as the plan I laid out. But that plan is more workable than you give it credit for.
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This isn't how ideological groups work. They do not hold power by being all fanatics who would support the same policies regardless of their factual beliefs about the world. Nor do they have unlimited ability to hold onto power if public opinion turns strongly against them. There are some people like that, but they rely on support from the much larger numbers of people who buy into mainstream "anti-racist" arguments premised on factually incorrect beliefs. Most supporters of any ideology are aligned with it by some mixture of traits like factual beliefs, trusted information sources, formal principles, and informal biases. Many of them can be persuaded by chipping away at their factual beliefs and their trust in their current sources of information. If mainstreaming HBD failed it would be because the vast majority continued denying it, not because people accepted it and then just shrugged. Affirmative action doesn't have majority support already, it hangs on through disproportionate elite support, but that doesn't mean it can continue to do so even if you persuade a large chunk of public/elite supporters.
Compare to libertarians. In theory principle-based libertarians shouldn't even care how effective libertarianism is, right? The justifications are stuff like Freedom and the Non-aggression-principle, not effectiveness. But of course it's not a coincidence that they generally believe libertarianism is effective as well. There's presumably some libertarians who would, for instance, oppose conscription even if they sincerely believed it was the only way to prevent being conquered by a communist nation, or support open-borders even if they thought it would result in statists taking power or otherwise end in disaster. But most wouldn't, and in fact I've noticed a notable number of libertarians and ex-libertarians online who became alienated from hardline libertarianism based on stuff like believing that open-borders would end disastrously for liberty. And once you get into actually trying to set government policy alongside people who don't care about principled libertarianism, of course "Privatizing X will end terribly for everyone, but we should do it anyways because Freedom" isn't an argument anyone makes.
There’s a hidden, well, not so hidden, extra factor that keeps people in line. Open questioning of the narrative is a career limiting move. In fact if you want to get fired, probably the easiest way to do it is to be openly racist. Even if people quietly accept that some versions of HBD are true, they’re by and large isolated from each other and prevented from speaking by the knowledge that fighting the narrative is only going to mean poverty and shame. Even the outspoken critics of the blank slate are pretty careful about their identity unless they are in a position to get money exclusively from HBD adjacent communities. Persuasion doesn’t matter if open beliefs are going to ruin your career.
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Every regime in power by necessity, has to try and create ideological buy-in with the rest of the population, to draw in their support and compliance that provides them with the legitimacy the seek. But it doesn't have to broadly succeed to be able to remain in power. If you look at the approval ratings of the current administration in the US, I think it quite easily spells out that you can rule over your citizens and subjects, despite strong disagreement and not trusting any of their institutional organs.
With libertarians, there's a tradeoff between resilience and efficiency. Libertarianism works very well in near equilibrium systems, but struggles massively with radical shifts and systemic changes. A lot of inadequate solutions to problems that have politically been punted to economists to figure out often fail, because the nature of the solutions are hopelessly mired at the margins. They deal in smooth, frictionless, 'incremental' changes. When time runs out for gradual change to take place to settle to a solution and you need decisive action, you need the scale of change to take place that's truly revolutionary. In the modern technological world we live in, you need strategic top-down, decisive action. And that often comes in the form of centralized power and authority that can make large-scale, sweeping changes take place.
The problem with a lot of democratic societies is that they often show that they're unable of making effective top-down decisions that are proportionate to the severity of the problem. In fact, they were specifically designed to 'prevent' people from taking drastic actions. This is why at heart I'm an authoritarian and don't have problems identifying with fascist ideology.
How much do you suppose the average Tang dynasty farmer approved of the Emperor's bureaucrats? Or how the average Medieval English peasant felt about their local earl? Peasant revolts were not uncommon during the Middle Ages, but the people in charge remained on top (my go-to example of the German Peasants' War is but one of many). Oderint dum metuant. Superior coercive force goes a long way in keeping large numbers of people under one's proverbial boot.
I'm not sure if you're simply adding to my statement or disputing it. I fully agree with the point you're making here.
Adding some reinforcement to the quoted part — that was a rhetorical "you, the reader", not "you, Tretiak" in that first question; I can see, re-reading my comment, how that could be unclear. Sorry about that.
And maybe a bit of disputation on the necessity of "ideological buy-in with the rest of the population." Again, it seems like you mostly just need that from your military/enforcers, not powerless peasants (the long commented correlation between labor-intensity of warfare and levels of "democratization"). I mean, look at any time one group of people have conquered and subjugated another. (How much "ideological buy-in" did the Romans ever get from the Jews?)
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I disagree. "Public opinion" means nothing, "democracy" is a sham, the masses are powerless nobodies, the elite holds all the power…
For quite awhile, a good number of my friends pondered why the habit of empires is so persistent, even in nations that define themselves as free and open societies. The answer really isn't all that complex, I think. Every nation, no matter what character or political system they adopt, wants to maximize their share of power in the world. Why wouldn't they? That's the inherent structure of the international system. It's foundational to international relations theory (IR) as well.
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Your post is a potent illustration of a point I have made many times that fell upon deaf ears.
HBD is a fact.
Denying it is an erroneous rejection of reality. It's the thing that doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.
The implications, however, are a matter of preference, and further downstream are the policies you wish to enact.
Looking at the same disparity in group IQs, one can:
Use that as a justification for racism, in the strong sense, like disbarring them from the commons. Kicking them out of a country. Banning miscegenation.
Still discriminate, but on more utilitarian grounds, such as by demanding IQ tests of prospective immigrants so that the baseline level of IQ necessary for a wealthy, comfortable and cohesive society does not become diluted into dysfunction. Are you black but still above 100 IQ? You're welcome. It's regrettable that this disqualifies 70% of your compatriots, but it's not personal.
Argue that this justifies more redistribution. After all, we aid the sick and pay for the disabled. Why not prop up those who are cursed to be dumber because of their genes and had no say in the matter?
Or like me, argue that this is a problem to be solved, by means such as genetic engineering and polygenic screening. We know thousands of genes that all weakly contribute to intelligence. We can perform embryo selection, and with iterated embryo selection get nigh arbitrary gains limited only by our knowledge of causative genes and number of cycles we wish to churn through. This will almost certainly pay for itself. There is no fundamental biological reason that skin color should have any correlation with ones intelligence, anymore than painting an F1 car a different shade will change lap times beyond measurement error. I strongly suspect that even facial physiognomy can be conserved as long as you leave enough damn room in the skull for the brains, to head off claims that people have made before. Hooked noses do not make Jews smarter, flatter ones do not make Africans dumber. Melanin production has no reason to affect neuronal function, unless you really screw the pooch and end up with albinism.
I obviously endorse 4. Intelligence is as close to an unalloyed good as it gets. I do not think 1 is a good idea.
2? I can get behind it, at least until root-cause modification can be enacted. Most sane countries have this to a degree, if they privilege educational attainment, which is a decent proxy for intelligence. Not enough, sadly, and they ruin it by letting in "asylum seekers", keeping illegals and so on.
3? Not a fan. Eventually we'll all be economically obsolete, so I certainly would prefer UBI that does not care that I'm OOMs dumber than a hypothetical AGI. But I will tolerate no more redistribution, while humans have to pull their weight, than is absolutely necessary to ensure that people don't starve to death, have a permanent domicile, education and medical care. Not additional participation dollars for being too incompetent, beyond what anyone should receive.
But what remains obvious, for those with eyes to see, is that group differences in intelligence exist, have enormous empirical impact, that denying this inevitably leads to suspicions of systemic racism that's keeping otherwise fine folk down, and all the consequences of a gaping ideological blindspot in one's understanding of the world.
please elaborate
Albinism doesn't have negative effects on IQ, but the lack of melanin can fuck up the eye. And as med school processors love to say, the eye is an extension of the brain, from a developmental and anatomical standpoint.
https://eyewiki.aao.org/Albinism
What I'm getting at is that if you modify phenotypes too much, then you can get subtle knock-on effects, and in this case, you don't have to go full albinism. But we have examples of happy, healthy and functional people with very high IQs, so there are enormous gains to be made with conservative approaches before you start to make painful tradeoffs (like the recent reports of a family in Ireland with a mutation that gives them 20 IQ points extra but causes blindness in their 20s).
You can make the average person much smarter and not have negative consequences.
thanks, interesting. Is it possible in principle to make a chimera with mutant allele in one brain hemisphere but normal allele in another?
I did some googling on ablinism and intelligence and there's some publications that say that albinism increases intelligence and/or some educational skills (might be explained by that children with albinism spend more time indoors).
In principle? Why not. Or at least I see nothing that categorically rules it out.
I don't imagine this will be easy. You would need to find a way to ensure chiral gene expression, either as an intervention in an embryo (after a certain point you know which cells are going to remain on one side) , or a more complicated deployment method if you chose to try gene therapy in an adult. Maybe you could selectively loosen the blood brain barrier in one hemisphere when you inject the vectors.
If there's a gene that works that way already that could be co-opted, I haven't heard of one, but I'm not a subject matter expert. My knowledge about mosaicism, at least in gene therapy, is when it's an unwanted consequence arising from an inability to spread the target gene to all cells.
If I had to go about this, I'd prefer finding a separate solution to the blindness or figuring out a way to prevent it from setting in in the first place instead of something so complicated.
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There's a lot of reason to doubt this. I've never seen cats engaged in widespread, highly destructive warfare. I've never seen ants commit infanticide. I've never seen a donkey shoot someone. I've never seen a horse rob a bank. If you're ever in any kind of situation that requires problem solving skills, having intelligence is the best thing you could rely upon, surely. But intelligence is also what produces conflict, disagreement, chaos and dysfunction.
I think humans live better lives than cats, ants, donkeys or horses. And it's not all thanks to opposable thumbs. And ants certainly commit infanticide. That's half the fun for them when it comes to raiding other colonies, even of the same species, the other half being enslaving the babies I guess.
No, intelligence is not what produces conflict. Dumb creatures have plenty of conflict. Likely more conflict, if one looks at the rates of violence and murder in a chimpanzee tribe and compares it to the average human one. We live better lives.
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That smelled wrong, and indeed the counterexample was only about 1.5 googles away.
More generally, imputing any sort of capability for non-cruelty to animals does not align with my understanding of the natural world at all. There are examples abound of animals routinely fighting conspecifics to the death, and I'm pretty sure approximately no animals have a notion of private property that extends beyond the reach of the "owner"'s teeth and claws. The best thing you could say is that without intelligence they can't found banks, and their capacity for appreciating their own suffering is low.
Fair enough. However I believe we call that one missing the forest for the trees.
I expanded my post a bit; really, I don't think there is a forest of edenic animal nonviolence there to miss. Since we were already talking about ants, I think I saw a BBC documentary years ago about what exactly happens when an ant colony prevails over another (I think the human terms are somewhere in the space of mass enslavement and genocide?). It's unclear that humans ever destroy more once you control for volume/complexity/economic value of what humans produce. If you actually are tempted to affirm the idea that it is really worse to create banks and then rob them than to never create banks at all, I take it you would also prefer the (education and human development level of the) 30 Years' War over the present situation because the sum total of things that were destroyed back then were fairly worthless by modern standards?
I have absolutely zero idea what in the world this has to do with my original statement.
Your statement, as I understood it, was that intelligence is not an unalloyed good because intelligence enables agents to do more damage. You sought to back this statement up by a list of claims about bad things humans do but animals (as an extreme example of something much dumber) don't.
In response to this, I claimed:
(1) animals still do bad things (that was my first response);
(2) the bad things that animals do are not actually better than the bad things humans do (this was my second response), and hence I disagree with your argument against intelligence being an unalloyed good.
Specifically, I argued (2) by saying that a calculus of badness that says that the bad things that animals do are less bad than the bad things that humans do may have implications that I certainly don't agree with, and I would be surprised if you agree with them either. Is a lion that roars at a weaker lion to chase it away and then steal its prey "better" than a human that robs a bank? If yes, why? If you say this is because the bank is worth much more than the dead antelope, is a marauding band of soldiers in the 17th century that burns down a wooden farmhouse with no plumbing or electricity (worth maybe $50k on the modern market) also better than someone who robs a bank today for $1m?
I think you're reading way too much into my statement. I was making a very simple, [what I'd have thought was a] very uncontroversial point. Intelligent people gave us climate change. Intelligent people gave us World War 2. Intelligent people gave us atomic weapons. Intelligent people gave us Planned Parenthood. Intelligence may 'not' be among the best mother nature has to offer her creatures, since animals live in relative peace of a kind that vastly outstrips the destruction humanity has wrought on itself throughout history. And your first point addresses something I never said, so that's not relevant.
Incidentally, looking back, I don't think it's a good idea to go around trying to stretch and stuff every sentence with $2 words pulled from a thesaurus, because that's what your statements read like to me, and it's very difficult to read them thinking they're meant to be seriously taken, without eye rolls.
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Which, in the Kendi framework, makes you a racist. HBD-blogger Jayman is clear on this too. All your genetic engineering, polygenic screening, embryo selection, even if fully voluntary, is still "Nazi shit."
Again, you are calling for a "fix" which holds that the problem is with underperforming minorities, not the system. In the Kendi view, there is absolutely nothing wrong with black people, their intelligence is just fine the way it is, and anyone who disagrees is racist. For the anti-racist, the only problem to be fixed is that society treats groups differently based on their intelligence. Equity, fairness, and justice demand that groups receive equal outcomes no matter how much smarter one is than the other.
Again, privileging "educational attainment", or "intelligence", or anything else that differs between ethnic groups — no matter how much of an "unalloyed good" you may think it to be — is, in the Kendian framework, nakedly racist, and will be crushed accordingly.
As OP says, the eyes of fat acceptance activists, taking ozempic makes you fatphobic. My thing is: I don't think anyone cares now that there is a viable intervention. Even they don't care, when they can make money.
This article is a potential clue to how it'd go:
...
If this is the sort of thing former-Kendi disciples have to tell themselves before helping along their black patients, so what? Their cope is their business. But, at a certain point, the public will want what it wants and someone will cater. The people with nothing to gain (or lose) can write NYT op-eds but everyone else will profit.
Also, we give him too much credit. Kendi may be the most popular purveyor of a certain view, he/it thrives in a bubble and with the forbearance of the people within (he almost never does hostile media for a reason). He's a product of George Floyd and white benefactors like Jack Dorsey who want to Do Something. Who said they'll stick around once they hear X treatment will raise Africa's IQ (this could be the thin end of the wedge because even the anti-HBDers think there's room for enhancement there)? Who said black people will?
EDIT: There's also another world where white people get the treatment first and then there's talk of closing the gap, for equity.
When it comes to genetic fixes, I disagree. I've encountered too many people, both IRL and online, whose opinions on the topic are such that I fully expect them to join whatever real-life Blue Cosmos ends up forming once serious engineering comes along. There's the classically-religious sort, who already object to IVF and find the whole field "meddling in God's domain" (I don't know who else remembers Bush-era "bioethics" debates.) There's the environmentalist-leaning who are already protesting GMO crops as "Frankenfoods" — their opinions on potential "Frankenpeople" as the worst example yet about how human beings are a virus and everything we do corrupts or destroys nature. Or people like the guy living in Germany who used to show up in the Marginal Revolution comments to call Tyler Cowen a Nazi any time he brought up CRISPR, and would go on about human dignity and the un-amendable First Article of the German Constitution, how the "Nazi idea" is that one gene variant could ever be better or worse than another. Or the fellow who argued for preemptively nuking China should they fail to join us in banning it. Or the people who called for the UN to expand upon UNESCO's "Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights" and make the human genome part of the "common heritage of humanity" so that genetic engineering is legally equivalent to vandalizing the Parthenon or such. Or all the countries who have already banned germline modification. Or…
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I'm exceptionally fortunate that I couldn't care less what Kendi thinks, and his stream of thought can't really hurt me.
After all, Scott Alexander endorses genetic engineering and polygenic screening, and look at that, he makes 2 orders of magnitude more money than I do and holds an AMA registration. What an awkward situation, given that he has a far larger audience and more content than yours truly. Hardly something being crushed like you claim.
If that makes me a Kendian-racist, my question is, so? He makes a lot of things racist. His success and reach is not infinite.
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By that logic, BIPOCs also get less say in running society. Part of the reason we tolerate children lashing out, including with low level violence like that, is because children do not get to make decisions for themselves, nor have a meaningful say towards collective decisions, and if they get uppity they get a spanking. And the reason is because they, like BIPOCs in your example, are genuinely less capable. We don't expect children to have the same outcomes as adults.
I would rather have the law be colorblind, and if that means prisons are 52% black or whatever that's what it means, maybe they should do less crime. But if we're going to give the blacks handouts and redistribute white wealth to them and tolerate black-on-white violence as a paternalistic duty, then they should lose the franchise because children don't get to vote, and have fewer rights and freedoms because that's how you treat children. For example, most cities in my neck of the woods do not allow minors to be out of the house unattended after a certain time, minors have strict restrictions on their ability to sign a contract, limited access to credit, etc, etc.
By this logic even BIPOCs should also support much lower migration to maintain a favorable balance of tolerant white paypigs to keep the system going
Nobody acts like this though (blacks are only just starting to turn on the pro-migrant party, when they see costs imposed directly on them) so Jayman is likely just an outlier and most people don't take this sort of thinking to that conclusion.
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Very good comment and I think you're right about the underlying beliefs of the hardcore "equity" crowd. However I do believe that there's a limiting factor here in that most of the biggest proponents are in the PMC, which is why, out of hypocritical self-interest, they try to keep the politics of envy focussed on "billionaires" (previously the "1%" until some of them realised they were technically in that group).
Unfortunately while this makes Full Communism less likely it doesn't help so much with the racial angle especially since the PMC is generally able to insulate themselves from the worst aspects via informal segregation (eg expensive neighbourhoods with "good schools").
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