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This is why I am strongly against the laity getting too involved in anything intelligence adjacent, be it IQ head measuring or HBD "Race Realism":
At the end of the day, 50% of the population is going to be subaverage, and 70% of the population is going to get a failing grade, and 98% of the population will be locked out of the upper echelons of anything but lifting and dropping heavy rocks.
It doesn't matter if X race produces X% more of this or that measurement Goodhartism, because You Won't Be Him.
The purpose of society is to produce a stable living arrangement where as many people as possible feel that it is not worth it for them to for example, burn your shit down and then kill you, where you is every member of society. You can achieve this through force, but that is an unstable equilibrium. It is better to do this through consent.
If you implicitly tell people "Sorry, your worth was decided by a genetic factor that was inborn and can only be changed by small percentages", what they will hear is "I am placing myself above you, and everyone like you, and your children, forever. So, what you should do is fucking kill me".
It behoves us all to preserve the fiction: most stupid people end up away from the controls (except when a populist spasm makes one president), generally only rich people get to be truly stupid and then they lose all their shit and are replaced; it's only our historically permissive state that allows the idiots of the world their power at the moment, it will pass.
Then there is something wrong with them that was not wrong with medieval peasants. Nobility places themselves and their children above peasants, but peasants did not react with "I can't tolerate hierarchy, so I'm going to kill my superior." They just wanted a little noblesse oblige, which is reasonable.
Our society has completely different bas fundamental philosophies then the Medievals? The web of different rights and obligations for different classes of society has been dead a while now and was on the way out once the modern period got going.
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Recall what happened to the aristocrats who didn't get with the program once the situation evolved, and the bargain no longer held.
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Those peasants still would have considered themselves as "on the same team" as their nobility, with interlinked interests and fortunes. Empirically, it is much harder to extend that sentiment across racial lines, especially with as stark a difference as that between Europeans and Africans and doubly so when the labor of the underclass isn't required for the persistence of the upperclass.
There is no way Africans could kill off Europeans. The opposite is very plausible, it's just that Europeans are too nice. If Africans try because they get the "red eye" as Jamaicans like to say, it will probably not turn out so well.
Sure, but enslaved Jamaicans and modern African-Americans definitely do not just want "a little noblesse oblige". I don't know how much medieval peasants resented their social superiors, but it had to have been orders of magnitude less than black resentment towards whites.
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Yes, I've always felt the race stuff is seriously burying the lede. What do you care how smart some other people you don't know (but happen to look like) are? What matters is how smart you are, and how smart your family is. (Your spouse and friends too, but you choose them.) And the fact that that is overwhelmingly genetic (if it in fact is) is what's truly damaging to the liberal order. If your family has been poor for generations, that's probably not going to change this generation and there's a limited amount you can do about that. Meanwhile, a rich family can lose everything and, by Clark, be right back on top within two generations. It's not that society is insufficiently meritocratic, it's that you in particular lack the sort of merit society cares about, and your children likely will too.
But -- and this a very important 'but' -- being poor is a vastly different experience today than it was in the past. Maybe you're twentieth percentile income and your great grandfather was too, but your level of material comfort would easily have been sixtieth percentile in his day. I'm not saying relative position doesn't matter, but it matters a lot less than absolute wealth on the low end. Not starving is way, way better than starving regardless of how well everyone else eats.
I'm not saying this hasn't happened, but it's remarkably rare historically. Consider American chattel slavery: they were told the latter, and in far more absolute terms. It's always possible to get lucky and have an unusually smart child, or to gradually marry up, but the children of slaves were made slaves by legal fiat, not a lack of ability. And, obviously, slaves were treated far worse than... actually, just about anyone today, likely including death row prisoners. But certainly worse than people who are merely poor.
So... how many slave revolts were there? Well, some. Not that many. How many successful slave revolts were there? Zero. Slaves didn't play no role in their eventual liberation, but it was a comparatively small one; much less on average than white northerners. And it certainly didn't end in the mass slaughter of the slave-owning class (much to the displeasure of some, both back then and today).
I'm not saying slavery was a stable equilibrium -- it wasn't, obviously -- just that the mechanism of its instability was moral outrage among freemen, not workers rising up. Revolutions -- violent changes in policy -- are rare in general, and most revolutions are driven by the relatively well off. Which makes sense: ability matters in violence too. So do relative freedom to coordinate and wealth to supply the fighters.
When the lowest of the low lash out, as a rule they're easily crushed. The only example springing to mind where it actually worked out is Haiti. (For some value of 'worked out,' anyway; I do suspect the average Haitian benefitted substantially, even given their absolute-terms poverty.) In France and Russia the mob had some say, but not at first; only after the old order had completely collapsed and there was no functional system to oppose them.
All the above is to say: the threat of violent rebellion is not the limiting factor on repression. It wasn't two hundred years ago, and viable weapons systems have only gotten more expensive. Voting-as-a-proxy-for-war was never actually true, and it's only gotten less true over time. The truth is that incumbent systems have an enormous advantage over challengers in that they're already organized and funded and have used their position to attract and train capable people. A government established through force, once well established, is not nearly so easy to dissolve. Women didn't get the vote for their newly recognized capacity for rebellion and they didn't really get it for the pity of men either (as I've occasionally seen suggested here). They got it because of the dynamics of a system that no one truly controls, that had long since taken on a life of its own.
To reel it back in a bit: no, antiracism is not motivated by the fear of black power. Ask a thousand white self-described antiracists if that's their motivation, and you'll hear a thousand 'no's (and likely some much less civil language). And I don't believe they're lying or confused about their motivations -- black power has never been a credible threat, so why would they (or anyone else) fear it? Black power could be troublesome -- and I do believe that possibility played some role in the Civil Rights movement -- but actually killing a substantial fraction of white people? Not a chance.
Moreover,
is uncontroversially true and broadly understood for e.g. people with Down Syndrome, who are not brutally repressed and do not often lash out in rage at the unfairness of the world. Fetuses with Down Syndrome are preferentially aborted, but no one capable of understanding that fact has anything to fear from abortion. If anything's unstable about their treatment, it's the high-and-still-rising cost of the handouts they're given.
Consider long-term disability payments more generally. Lots of people sign up deliberately, announce to world that they're permanently incapable of productive work (sometimes on the basis of genetics, but not always). Tons of applicants get rejected because of how many healthy people decide that their pride is worth less than a small monthly payment. If ASI renders all human labor obsolete, I'm prepared to accept that neither I nor my descendants will ever be a tenth as intelligent as it is, and I'll gladly take any handouts on offer. (There could certainly be other problems there, but just the fact it's smarter than me and there's nothing I can do about it isn't a big one.)
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Sorry this solution is no longer workable. It existed 1980-2008. But now there is no going back. The polity will look for answers on why 1% of Africans are Doctors and it will be racism.
Shittification of other things will happen. Jewish screenwriters won’t get jobs. And then TV will suck. They will create test to discriminate against white people in ATC and planes will crash. We won’t have a good argument for limiting 3rd world immigration and become a third world country. We won’t put crackheads in jail because too many of them are black and QOL in the commons will collapse.
We are just exiting this world I described. My view is either everyone believes HBD or the shittification of everything occurs. It’s an easy choice for me.
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I’ll tell you this much. There’s great utility in pretending to be an idiot. Because if you display anything that demonstrates intelligence, competence or virtue, then people beat on your ass constantly to solve their problems and you become the explanation for why things are a problem to begin with. Because you have the power to fix things and choose not to. There’s a small handful of things I know how to do that I’ve hidden from virtually everybody throughout my life because if they knew about it, everyone would be completely up my ass about it. I learned that mistake a long time ago and nobody would ever leave me alone. I just let people draw false conclusions about me all the time and I just look over at them and smirk after they have their back turned to me and leave.
A friend of mine who’s a software developer once joked with me about how the hiring manager above him was an idiot and blamed him for everything. “You’re deep in shit up to your elbows, you’re 2x over budget on the project, the product is supposed to ship in 3 months, you’re in the exact same position you were in before I got here, but now somehow it’s my fault.”
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I'm not sure I buy that we need noble lies of this kind to hold society together.
Surely, we can acknowledge that different people have different natural endowments without setting up society for the masses to tear down the great and powerful? Why isn't the message, "You're almost certainly not going to be The Guy, but if you play by the rules, and work hard, you can enjoy a standard of living that is better than a medieval king, thanks to The Guy", not a winning message?
I just feel like we could cultivate the virtues of comparing down not up, of comparing to the past instead of the present, and cultivate civic virtue and trust within society.
Honestly, civic virtue is the thing I want in my fellow citizens far more than intelligence (though I like living in the country that brain drains all the other countries.) When I read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, the thing that struck me was just his agency and civic virtue. There's no lending library in your region? Why not create one? The streets in the neighborhood are dirty? Why not knock on your neighbors' doors and get everyone to pitch in for a street sweeper? That level of agency is almost unthinkable in today's society, partially because the low hanging fruit of civic virtue has all been picked, but partially because of a learned helplessness in much of the population.
One thing I've found interesting is observing when non-Anglos are open and honest about ethnic differences. The two that come to mind are a (Romani) entrepreneur I saw on TV saying that he won't hire other Romani, only Romanians, because Romani will try and cheat him. The other were a group of (heavy drinking) natives in Siberia saying, seemingly without bitterness, that Russians were richer than them because they (the natives) drank too much. And the fact that the Russians were the sober party in that description tells you how much they were drinking. I think in both cases intelligence was mentioned but I can't be sure.
Mizrahi Jews in Israel also seem to be pretty chill with the fact that Israel has never had a non-Ashkenazi Prime Minister, and that the elite is mostly Ashkenazi.
Maybe the real toxic meme is the idea that we need a noble lie. But then there are too many examples of ethnic animosity against the higher performing groups for me to conclude that it's just a western/Anglo thing.
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Because homeless alcoholics will use it as a shelter (and possibly light it on fire)?
Because there's almost certainly some regulation that makes this illegal.
In the case of Ben Franklin's lending library, it was all handled via mail so this is less of a consideration.
I do agree vetocracy is a big problem. But I am still inspired by modern examples like the Guerilla Public Service guy, who made helpful improvements to some freeway signs in California, and his improvements followed the jot and tittle of the legal specs for freeway signs.
I think if more people imitated his example, or the example of Ben Franklin, the world would be a better place. Honestly, if we're talking about civic disobedience, citizens being willing to be arrested for improving public infrastructure is exactly the world I want to live in.
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I'm homeschooling my 2nd grade daughter this year due to her autism not being accommodated in the classroom in 1st grade.
Naturally a lot of curriculum is "conservative" and describes itself as "classical." One thing I notice is the emphasis on how little people in the past had. The capstone book of the year is "Little House in the Big Woods," which is basically a woman's memoirs of how she had to live as a little girl on a homestead where all the food had to be made, water brought in from far away every day, wild animals to contend with, etc. Before that was "The Courage of Sarah Noble," a story about a little girl who traveled with her father to cook for him while he build a house by hand on new land they bought from Indians.
Lots of the short stories cover living off the land, working hard, making gifts instead of buying them, being content with little.
If I compare myself with my parents I feel impoverished, but compared to my grandparents I'm ahead and compared to my great-grandparents I might as well be royalty.
There is a lot wrong with modernity but I don't have to haul water on a daily basis or make my own soap and that means I'm better off than so many people, both in the past and now.
I have the sense that conservatives are more aware of this than others (both liberals and moderates) though I don't have hard data.
Was Little House in the Big Woods the one where the neighbor woman tells a story about being almost eaten by a panther? At the time I read it I just thought it was an interesting story, but looking back at it it's a super-visible way to illustrate that these people lived like Indian peasants do today.
The whole series is very interesting because it covers a family going from being subsistence farmers where meat is a special, a few times a year, treat to being townsfolk who can do things like buy clothes(instead of handmaking them out of raw fiber) and ride trains, and they're... incredibly grateful in later books.
Yeah, Laura's aunt Eliza tells a story at Christmas:
Eliza was walking to the spring to get a pail of water. Her dog was with her and started growling and pulling on her skirt with his teeth when she got near the path. He tore her skirt and snarled. Frightened, Eliza ran back home and closed the door to her house, leaving the dog outside. All day she and her three young children were stuck inside, unable to leave the house. Every time they tried to open the door, the dog snarled at them. They had no water the whole day and were unable to cook or drink anything. In the afternoon the dog calmed down and acted like nothing happened. They walked to the spring together and in the ground Eliza saw large panther tracks.
The books are great because Laura realized that her life exemplified a lot of people's experiences, but also that the past was vanishing and very few in the future would understand what it was like. She's not the best writer, but her books have stayed in print for a good reason.
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There is an actual problem here: for the 99% of the population that isn't a weird semi-autistic high-decoupling rationalist (and I'm not sure about many of them either), arguments are soldiers, and it's guaranteed that almost anyone who talks about racial IQ is going to be a terrible person who uses the idea to promote racial supremacy.
By the same token, anyone who tries to prevent mention of racial IQ is going to be a terrible person who uses the implicit assumption that racial IQs are equal to promote disparate treatment by race.
That doesn't follow. All that follows is that they must be saying it for some policy reason, not specifically what the policy reason is. Thinking "there are a lot of racists and I need to stop them" is still a policy reason.
It doesn't follow logically any more than yours does. It's an observation -- those who suppress racial IQ are pushing for some sort of preferential treatment for a favored racial group.
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This belies the truth, though. 50% of the people in India are subaverage when it comes to India, just as 50% of the people in America are subaverage when it comes to America. That doesn't hold when you combine the two, or when you compare to the world at large.
There is, in other words, an absolute scale that exists independent of the relative scale, and the absolute scale matters more. The absolute scale is how we get machines, electricity, and medicine. The absolute scale is what separates us from the apes, and separates the stars themselves from us in their turn.
If you want to dedicate society to producing biomass, then you can make that case, but it's a choice (a bad choice, in my opinion) that you've made. It's not universal. I think it is better for society to be the vehicle for man's advancement up the absolute scale of the universe. But if you want the bread dole because everybody loves bread, then, well, that's a different case to be made.
India is likely filled with 90% subaverage because they had the caste system which caused assortive mating creating a distribution that is not a normal distribution.
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