TitaniumButterfly
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User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
23hr ago
This would at least make me reluctant to adopt any explicitly or intentionally racist policies.
The trouble is that 'racist' is such an overloaded operator that it's perhaps worse than useless at this point.
Yeah, I agree that it isn't saying that there are no differences. But I do think that it is against setting up social divisions, at least, within the Christian community. We're
Lord have mercy, they told me the rapture wasn't real!
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
The enlightened gurus are also trying to scam you.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
Galatians 3,
there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus
Yeah, I have a hard time reading that as a statement about how there are actually no differences between these groups when it includes 'male and female' and the author (Paul) has no trouble delineating different roles and expectations for each of those based upon their intrinsic qualities and distinct purposes.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
Anyway, the New Testament does speak against racial divisions.
I am not so sure about this, except in very abstract and non-practical senses. Would you care to say more?
TitaniumButterfly
4d ago
It is plenty possible to gainfully employ low intelligence people into socially acceptable positions even as technology improves and our AI overlords come near. In fact, it would probably significantly increase the quality of life of many jobs having lower intelligence people working menial tasks to the best of their ability alongside more trained and capable individuals.
You seem very sure about this but haven't substantiated it at all. As it happens I disagree entirely and would be interested to know why you think so.
TitaniumButterfly
5d ago
At neurosurgery? Absolutely. At chinuch? Almost certainly not.
What are we talking about, again?
Given the results of integration I have a hard time calling it (the racism) 'nasty' rather than 'warranted' or even 'prescient'. So many downtown areas, neighborhoods, schools, and communities destroyed. So many lives and livelihoods lost. But at least we're not as mean now, I guess.
TitaniumButterfly
5d ago
It seems trivially obvious that a high school math teacher should have to pass a math test slightly higher than whatever they'll be teaching.
Yes, but then they didn't have anywhere near enough black or hispanic teachers, which was not an acceptable outcome in that culture.
So the instructive lesson of your analogy is that when you're buying nails, you should pick the brand with the higher quality reputation instead of testing each individual nail.
Truly in awe at how you got there from "The correct thing to do here is to start with Brand A and then apply the test on top of that."
Sure, that makes sense.
No it doesn't.
Not only did I explicitly say something contrary to your apparent conclusion after laying out the reasoning for you, but your interpretation doesn't make any internal sense to begin with. At this point I have to think that you're not capable of understanding or you do not wish to understand[1]. Either way we're done.
[1] Inclusive or.
TitaniumButterfly
7d ago
Respectfully, in this analogy, given the stakes and uncertainties involved, I don't think there's ever any justification for bothering with the inferior pool in the first place.
Of course, people aren't nails. So let's abandon the analogy.
At times it can make sense to import specific individuals - not classes of them - who have demonstrated utility, distinguished themselves, and so on. The bet being made here is that even if his kids are all rotten the good this specific person will do in this generation probably outweighs the future harm of his progeny. And instead you might get lucky and get a lot out of his kids, too!
The risk is greatly increased by a welfare state, of course. If his offspring are so economically unsuccessful that they can't afford to reproduce much or at all, the problem solves itself, which is how so many historical states managed nearly-unrestricted immigration. Come, contribute, succeed -- or read the writing on the wall and try elsewhere!
But the question I wonder about, and which I would very much like to be able to put a number on, is what percentage of a population can be non-conforming immigrants before institutions break down. I don't have an answer there and don't even feel really comfortable guessing. Different institutions have different capacities for this sort of thing, the collapse of one can snowball into others, and so on. The matter is playing with fire by its very nature.
By the way I'm the person you've been discussing this with on discord -- no intent to mislead you about that, in case you hadn't noticed. This seemed the better forum for this format of discussion.
Response to the conversation you've been having here in general since I couldn't decide on a single sub-reply to answer:
It's only a strawman if I'm mischaracterizing someone's position. My criticism only applies to those whose position matches my description of "insists on a low-resolution filter when it has no conceivable benefits". If their position is different from what I have described, then clearly my criticism would not apply to them.
This seems to be your main criticism, so it's an important one. I'm going to #include all of the prior responses to your top-level as context, so I'm assuming you can relate to the concept of 'regression to the mean' as something like 'measurement error'. An IQ test can tell us that a person is smart but not that their children will be. This is true and you seem to understand it. But it's also the case that there's a substantial amount of noise in IQ testing and an IQ test can tell us someone is above a certain threshold when they actually aren't, a 'false positive', in which case their children almost certainly won't be.
So with this in mind, an analogy:
You're in charge of purchasing nails for a massive new construction project. Millions of nails are required and they need to meet certain standards or else the structure collapses. The engineers factor in some redundancy and allow that some duds are okay, but no one's sure how many, exactly, so it's important that you be very careful.
Available to you are two brands, A and B. Both nail companies, A and B, produce some good nails and some defective ones.
Brand A is a domestic producer. It's been in business for a long time and turned out a pretty consistent product. In fact, it's been such a mainstay that the assumptions the engineers are working with are based on using these nails. About 10% are defective, but this is understood and historically structures built along these lines and with these nails stand up just fine.
Brand B is a foreign producer with shoddier craftsmanship. Neither the materials nor the manufacturing process are as high-quality. 90% of their nails fail to meet your standards, but 10% do! And they're cheaper, too.
Now, on the face of it you'd be insane to even entertain the idea of buying any nails from brand B. However, due to internal politics, there's strong pressure from the executives to maintain the fiction that all brands are of identical quality. Maybe many of them 'happen' to be major shareholders in Brand B. And it turns out that there's a way to test the nails, individually, and it's so fast and cheap that there's no reason at all not to test every single one. So you turn to your co-worker and say, "Look, there's a lot of pressure to buy from Brand B, and we can test the nails, so why not just do that?"
This is actually kind of a weird thing for you to argue about on the face of it, because the execs have made it clear they won't approve any testing in the first place. (Again one can't help but wonder at their motivations). But your co-worker additionally expresses reluctance because of one more consideration: testing error. 10% of the time, for whatever reason, the nail test returns a positive (desirable) result regardless of whether the nail is good or not. 90% accuracy is still pretty good, you argue, but he's not so sure.
He points out that if you apply that test to Brand A's nails, 99% of the nails used will meet the standards. But if you apply the test to Brand B's nails, almost half of the nails used will be garbage. Can the structure withstand that? Who can say? Oh and by the way both of you and everyone you care about is going to live in it and if it collapses all is lost.
The correct thing to do here isn't to treat both brands as a priori equal and go based on test results. The correct thing to do here is to start with Brand A and then apply the test on top of that. What non-political justification could you possibly even have to screw around with Brand B in the first place?
As such I think you should drop this criticism.
If you find someone saying "We should buy from Brand A and not bother testing", the criticism would be a bit more valid, but at least they've got historical performance on their side, which is worth something.
EDIT: P.S. the end of the story is the executives insist that you buy mainly from Brand B without any testing, the structure begins to list badly, the executives fly off to their villas elsewhere, and everything you value is destroyed. Possibly you could move to another company before that happens but it seems that somehow they're all making the exact same mistake.
TitaniumButterfly
11d ago
TitaniumButterfly
14d ago
You'll need enormous amounts of transmission capacity to take solar electricity from California over the mountains to the East Coast or down from Northern Canada.
Surely something like Texas would make more sense than California here? There's a lot of empty land in the South.
TitaniumButterfly
14d ago
I've heard multiple energy-industry insiders say freely that most renewables such as wind exist entirely because of the subsidies and aren't even remotely defensible without them.
TitaniumButterfly
16d ago
Here in the US there are no laws against it at all.
IIRC there are some (at non-Federal levels) but they're pretty much symbolic as they are superseded by the first amendment, and some even have language such as 'except as protected by the First Amendment' etc.
TitaniumButterfly
16d ago
I don't think I understand your confusion. Yes, culture also has effects. It is comparable to asking whether training affects dogs. Sure it does! It has an enormous impact. But the collie still wishes to herd.
TitaniumButterfly
18d ago
I think of it in terms of biology and selection pressure. Pressure to be better will result in better humans. Remove that (with redistribution or weird cultural forces) and degeneration must set in. It works that way for every other species and it's bizarre to me that people don't make the connection with our own.
There absolutely can be a middle ground, but it comes down to what sort of person is differentially reproducing.
TitaniumButterfly
21d ago
Yes, but culture is downstream of genetics. I want to distinguish here between 'culture' and 'incentives' (especially negative incentives) because you can easily get anyone to behave by hitting them enough times.
With that out of the picture, people can only thrive in a culture to the degree that their genetics allow them to. Put another way, genetics is like a foundation and culture is like the house built on it. People who are not suited to the culture will chafe under it and do worse in it and generally fail to participate in the way that those suitable would.
Over time and with selection pressure, this works out because those capable of conforming do, and reproduce, and those incapable of conforming 'drop out' and fail to reproduce.
Alternatively, the culture shifts (generally degrades) to accommodate those less-suited.
TitaniumButterfly
22d ago
I'm short on time so this is more of a low-effort drive by than I'd like but:
A perpetual irritation to me is how so many people, even in spaces like this, think "HBD" means "IQ differences" while missing the much bigger, much more interesting picture.
Traits such as aggression, impulse control, parental investment, fidelity, industriousness, cleanliness, punctuality, aesthetic preferences, and innumerably more are all present in animal species, vary among subspecies, and are clearly genetic in origin -- especially in species without culture to speak of. Can different branches of humanity, having been split off for hundreds if not thousands of generations, which evolved in very different environments (and very different cultures), and admixed with separate strains of alt-hominids (neanderthals, florensis, etc.) possibly not have some substantial drift here?
Just the last few hundred years alone have had enormous amounts of different selection pressures on different populations.
When I think of HBD, IQ is one of the least-glaring things that stands out to me. There are smart and dumb people in any group, though yes the average and the tails certainly do matter. But the character of a people is also heavily genetic. The societal conditions which will allow them to flourish (or keep them in miserable persistence at best) vary widely. Even if there were no average IQ difference, we are not built to flourish with each other. Attempts to do so only result in sinking to the lowest common denominator and generally curtailing the highest potentials of all groups in the case of xenophilic multiculturalism, or all groups but the dominant one in most historic human societies.
Not that you're necessarily making this mistake, but OP didn't mention IQ and I think it's tragically myopic to think of IQ first when considering HBD. It just happens to be one of the easiest things to measure.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
South Africa made the same mistake because the continued dominance of Europeans over the black and brown masses seemed as obvious as day and night to everyone at the time.
I'm still trying to figure out what changed.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
your individual genes would have an exceptionally small effect on the outcome of a battle with hundreds/thousands of soldiers
Why?
I'm having a hard time imagining why you think so. I'll try two angles but lmk if neither is what you meant.
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You mention "your individual genes" not making much of a difference, but humans fight as ethnic groups. The other men in your army are probably much more closely related to you than the enemies are, and share a lot of the traits which distinguish you from the enemy. So no, one soldier being a bit more courageous isn't likely to affect much, but in aggregate it's likely that one side is going to be substantially more courageous than the other, for several reasons including culture, nutrition, and, yes, genetic distinctiveness. Over enough iterations this should propagate.
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Maybe you think that the relatively tiny (in absolute numerical terms) genetic differences between ancestral groups can't amount to much? In fact there are plenty of single-allele mutations which have outsized effects on all sorts of things from body shape to behavior. A lot of the ones we think about most often are deleterious because those stand out more: when someone gets a nasty FOXP2 mutation and can't really engage in human-level speech, that's obvious and we go looking for the cause, which happens to be easy to spot. But suppose there were a mutation which made someone (and by extent his descendants) 20% more courageous? How would that even play out? We'd probably only know about it if it had unfortunate side-effects like also making carriers prone to violent crime or something, which seems plausible. Here's an interesting candidate, though due to the prohibitions on research into such topics set in place by today's dominant religion, we seem to know less about it today than we did fifteen years ago.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
I honor your generosity in sharing this.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Sadly, people who suffer malnutrition, abuse, or fetal alcohol syndrome will be both uglier and stupider.
Yes, but a lot of this is genetic. Good traits correlate with good traits and bad traits correlate with bad traits, and this is partly due to assortative mating. Check this out:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/04/myers-race-car-versus-the-general-fitness-factor/
Just a tangent here, but the Bible isn't designed to be a philosophical guiding light on its own. It even says not to do that, but to also hold to the traditions received extra-biblically, i.e. the Church, which is designed to be a philosophical guiding light.
Seems to me that when (much of) the Western world started trying to use the Bible in a way it specifically says not to use it, that's where we got into trouble.
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