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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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More generally, a principle I believe in is: it's much harder to solve a problem when you're deliberately ignorant to the cause. We didn't solve anything in the '60s, I think we put off the problem, and we'll have to pay, with interest, but I'm not totally sure the form this will take.

I think this is right. Somewhere in the HBD debate is the idea that you can provide more humane welfare with the recognition of how groups vary. If some groups are just going to have a harder time with professional training, maybe we can stop torturing them with memes like "learn to code!" and accept that if we want them to have an $80k/year quality of life, we're going to need to give them $80k/year.

To be clear, my vibe is that the difference in IQ between racial groups is not very significant but it's hard to know for sure given that any serious researcher who talks about HBD commits career suicide.

Anyway, this acknowledgement that some groups can't learn to code their way out of poverty will be good practice for the near future, when machines have rendered all of us unable to do productive work and we are all completely dependent on the state.

We're a long ways off from there really being no way to make money if you aren't substantially brighter than average. My plumber makes 250k, he's been doing it a while but his company is just him and two other guys.

I think that if we separated kids by ability and slotted them into tracks that lead to realistic career choices, you could have a lot of very successful Black and White tradesmen, foremen, etc.

But first, we'd have to admit that aptitude is a thing, and that not everyone can grow up to be a physicist. We make perfect the enemy of the good, and it's mostly the underserved who pay for it.

I think it's interesting that the wokes seem to push hard for more representation in the various fields where much of the compensation is in status(doctor, teacher, most writing jobs, etc), less hard for jobs where they're roughly equal(nurses make bank right now, but it's kind of an average job in terms of status), and not at all for jobs which are more or less trading status for money(electrical linemen, for example).

And my lived experience with the trades is- take with a grain of salt because it's anecdata- that bosses hire blacks easily, but they're much less likely to make it and usually end up in the least technical jobs available in a given field/company/department.