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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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But what if it goes mainstream, and from subconscious to conscious?

In some ways, it kind of has. The overwhelming consensus in mainstream discourse is the environmental model of intelligence/capability/doing-well-in-modern-society: if you have loving parents, went to a good school/college, had good nutrition etc. you're going to be more likely to be successful in a wide range of metrics and the mentioned things are causally affecting this. At the same time, a common narrative is how certain groups, e.g. ethnic minorities, the poor or people from the Global South have less access to things like Spanish immersion daycare or well-funded schools, i.e. exactly the things that are supposed to boost intellectual capability.

The obvious conclusion when considering these ideas together is that at this very moment, even if it's subject to change and also the result of unethical acts like Colonialism or racial segregation, generally speaking a rich person will be smarter than a poor person, a white one smarter than a black one, a westerner smarter than a third-worlder. This also goes for a lot of other things education/the environment in general is sometimes said to cause in people, e.g. open-mindedness, kindness or critical thinking. Taking the environmental model seriously, all the disadvantaged groups should be seriously lacking in these things, at least in comparison to people with stable finances or those going to Harvard.

Now, obviously no one is shouting exactly that from the roofs in mainstream media. Instead, a popular approach, often documented in this space, has been to say that certain groups are lacking by Western/white standards, but only because those standards were implicitly or explicitly constructed to systematically supress other, equally valid ways of knowing and societal conduct. A well-known incarnation of that idea is the now-removed chart that the NMAAHC had on its website for a short while (1, 2, 3). This isn't quite the same as a full on 4chan IQ-redpill link dump and it's also not attributing anything to genes, but it's still acknowledging significant and pervasive (and therefore hard to change) group differences all the same.

Man, those links are a trip. If I showed those to anyone back in the '90s, they'd think it was something a White supremacist put together.

Every time I've seen it (and I've seen it plenty) my thought is "Goddamn, this is the quiet part out loud". Dozens of black (and white?) people - full fucking committees - looked at that poster and didn't see the problems with it. Incredible.