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Ordinarily I'd just report you for being a low-effort/single-issue troll * and move on but seeing as I don't expect the mods to actually do about this I'm going to go against my own advice and feed the troll, because like @FCfromSSC I find that preferable to ceding this space to the enemy with out a fight.
So, to answer your question, two things spring immediately to mind.
First is the issue @Evinceo raises, if things like intelligence and personal discipline are primarily genetic why are the children of our elites so consistently idiots and drug addicts. This isn't a recent development either Strong man builds a grand empire, or sucessful empire only for his kids to piss it all away has been recurring theme throughout human history.
Second, the axis would have won WWII. The Japanese and German militaries both entered the war with a substantial advantage in technology and training over their opponents. If the HBD-Tards' and Woke-Cels' theories about race were accurate, this ought to have translated into quick and easy victory. Instead the racially diverse, hopelessly disorganized (IE decentralized), and utterly lacking in warrior spirit/tradition armies of the Aglosphere proved far more capable of cooperation, innovation, and stacking enemy dead like corde-wood than their ostensibly superior and racially homogenous opponents. As much as Weebs fetishize the IJNS Yamato but the historical truth is that the one time she actually fought enemy surface ships for real, she and her accompanying task force got thrashed by a by a squadron of 4 escort ships that collectively weighed less than Yamato's main armament. That sort of thing doesn't happen in a sane world run by math and autistic notions of genetic destiny.
* 2/3rds of BorfRebus' total posts have been abpout race/hbd
This was my exact experience as well. I subconsciously held that evolution stopped at the neck but ones the arguments and evidence were laid out the idea seemed to me completely absurd.
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I don't think race or warrior spirit or anything like that really factors into WWII. Much like WWI, what arguably won WWII was just being able to crank out More Stuff, with the occasional piece of Better Tech moving the needle here and there.
I agree, it doesn't factor in because we live in the counter-factual. IE a world where the things like culture, geography, economics, and blind luck matter a whole lot more than the perceived superiority or inferiority of a given genetic phenotype.
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Case in point, the Eastern Front, where Hitler himself expressed his astonishment at the sheer scale of Soviet manufacturing (of course, bolstered by Lend-Lease; but let us not diminish this achievement).
Which makes me want to pick on this in the main comment:
This really undersells how much of the European theatre, for most of the time, was really the Eastern Front.
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Would you please articulate exactly what set of rules we should adopt such that we'd ban someone for being a likely witch with an agenda? Do you want us to outright ban HBD posters? Holocaust deniers? Accelerationists? Anyone who shows wokeness? And if the answer to that is no, then please stop griping about how we don't ban everyone you'd ban because you'd arbitrarily ban anyone who rubs you the wrong way.
Yes, we see the people showing up to test the waters and see if they can turn this place into Stormfront. Unless you are advocating for a blanket content-based ban, we will continue to do what we're doing and enforce the tone rules stringently and allow people to trot out their witchiest hot takes if they can express them in a compliant manner.
We've been over this before, heck Zorba and I argued back and forth about it pretty much from TheMotte's founding the moment I stepped down.
Zorba, Cheeze, Et AL say "you can't just ban someone for consistently bringing the conversation down" and I reply that "consistently bringing the conversation down is pretty much the only valid reason to ban someone". Letter of the law vs the spirit and all that. This is further compounded by the fact that the values of accountability and due process are fundamentally incompatible with the desire for anonymity. You shouldn't be thinking of internet accounts as people. You should be looking at them as disposable personas.
This doesn't actually answer the question. We do ban people for "consistently bringing the conversation down," but to reach that level, they have to be "consistently" doing it, not just posting one or two bad posts. But you want us to pull the trigger as soon as we see one of those bad posts.
You are, in fact, arguing for a content-based ban. If someone trots out HBD theory, we should ban them. If someone starts posting about Da Joos, we should ban them. If someone questions age of consent laws, we should ban them. Whether you admit it or not, you're basically arguing that we should place certain topics off-limits.
On a purely practical level, have you considered that all this does is multiply our work because half our time will be spent whacking ItsDaJoosPoster#173?
And speaking for myself, no, I actually think the "disposable personas" attitude is toxic. Obviously many identities here are just disposable personas, but much of the reason Internet discourse tends to be low value is because of attitudes like that, that you aren't actually arguing with a person, you're arguing with a "disposable persona," and therefore Internet arguments are not interactions with other people, but essentially you firing off pixelated missiles at a row of Space Invaders. I am aware many people see it that way, but when I know I'm dealing with someone who treats discussions like that, I consider it little different than arguing with a sociopath; there's really no point.
I've answerd the question as best I can. And no I'm not arguing for a content-based ban. What I'm arguing for is consideration of an account's history in the decision, and that contrary to rationalist norms where in assumptions of trust and good faith are the default, a lack of history should instead be interpreted as evidence of bad faith. Especially when that new account displays prior knowledge. As I have tried to explain to you before; theMotte is a fringe offshoot of a fringe offshoot, it's pretty damn rare that someone just wanders in here off the street. I'm saying that theMotte has enemies, that we've had users flat out admit that they were here to radicalize people, to farm lolcows for /r/drama, and to get us driven off reddit. and that it is foolish to forget/ignore this.
When a new user with no prior established history starts pressing the sort of buttons that draw outside scrutiny, your first thought should be that "this guy is up to something". To the degree that an internet persona has value at all it is in it's established history. A persona without an established history has no value and can be disposed of without thought. This dehumanization is price one pays for anonymity, because humanity and anonymity are mutually exclusive.
Remember that as a moderator your job is not that of a cop or a lawyer, you are not here to enforce rules. You are a janitor, you are a shit filter, you are here to clean up messes.
With that in mind, remember I have been in your shoes. When you complain about half your time spending half your time slapping down throwaway accounts and my reply is "half? try closer to 2/3rds. what exactly did you think I was doing during my tenure?"
Well, see, I don't actually consider myself a rationalist, and I don't assume trust and good faith from new posters.
And as I have told you before, we know this. Like JC man, I know you think we're quokkas but I wish you wouldn't keep assuming we're stupid.
Okay, and being off reddit, a major part of that concern is now obviated. I am not sure how much we should actually care about being being "farmed for drama" anymore, and as for the agenda posters, yes, they're here.
If we're being honest, given my druthers I probably would shoot from the hip more often (though not as often as you). You are right that the latest iteration of "Hello fellow kids what do you think of HBD, pretty spicy stuff huh? Also, what about those Jews?" could probably be summarily banned with nothing of value lost. I think the place where I agree more with Zorba and less with you is that as a community, the norms established by moderation are important, and being seen as impartial and giving everyone enough rope to hang themselves is more valuable than being perceived as capricious and banhappy where any mod can just ban anyone who raises our hackles.
Then you're in the minority and are truly my spiritual successor. ;-)
I'm not assuming that anyone is stupid, i am remembering old arguments and projecting the results forward. Arguments that I will concede that I lost, but I still don't think I was necessarily wrong. Shoot from the hip and let the cards fall where they may. The worst that can happen is not bad at all.
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Doing this while also maintaining a stance against ban evasion just provides perverse incentives. The decent person who gets banned because they got hotheaded once too often is gone forever at the drop of a hat; the asshole coming in to disrupt just spins up a new account.
On the contrary the assholes, will spin new accounts regardless and that's exactly why I believe Zorba's policy of giving every new account "the benefit of the doubt" and "time to acclimitze to our norms" even when they had usernames like "rape_all_n1gg3rs, "throwaway[numberstring]", and "youburdensomecunt" was so misguided. We lost a number of valued posters over the years (Yodacrist, McJunker, Iprayiam, to name a few) to the 1st Geek Social Fallacy. Namely the unwillingness ostracize the bad actor and instead attempt to moderate other users' reactions to them.
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OK, stop there. The Japanese were a joke, technologically. They had a couple of goodies, like the Zero (which had 6 months of dominance before the Americans figured out how to fight it) but the rest of their military was terrible. They had no business declaring war. Their carriers were impressive right up until they took damage and blew up.
The Germans won their early victories with crappy Panzer I and II, and were heavily outclassed by French and British tanks of the era. What they did have were tactics, which the aristocratic Junkers of the Wehrmacht fought vociferously against. The likes of Guderian and von Rundstedt were saved only by the personal intervention of the autodidact Hitler.
The Americans conquered an entire continent, and the British the world. But sure, they were lacking in warrior spirit.
You have accidentally stumbled on the correct answer: attrition. That's how the war was won. The Allies simply had more steel, more coal, and especially the banks were utterly dedicated to the cause (because the Germans weren't going to pay back all those loans made to Europe). When you have 1,000,000 men and the enemy has 500,000, and you force a battle where both of you lose half a million men, you win.
The proper appellation is HIJMS Yamato.
But the Japanese did not start of attacking Pearl Harbor, they started off invading China 2 years before war kicked off in Europe; and they surely had an advantage in technology, organisation and training over the Chinese at the time. (The Chinese were an utter mess at this point.) The Japanese were shocked by the Chinese resistance after the initial advances, e.g. in Shanghai, because they expected Japan to steamroll over China in less than a year because they were Obviously Better, as evidenced in their surprise victory decades before in the First Sino-Japanese War (edit: and the Russo-Japanese war, and the occupation of Manchuria, etc, etc.)
The reason the US got roped into the war was in large part due to the US embargoing oil to Japan (in retaliation of Japanese activities in colonial southeast Asia, including actions made to secure resources for the mainland campaign and to cut off aid to China). If their technological and cultural advantage over the Chinese was sufficient to overpower China (the “substantial advantage in technology and training”), the US may not have been involved in the war after all, or at the very least, the timeline would be drastically different.
It isn’t much of an argument for HBD in any case. The Japanese military was delusional, campaigning to conquer a country at least an order of magnitude larger was always going to be a Herculean task, any technological advantages aside, and it wasn’t like China was working with sticks and stones. One would have to also ignore how the Chinese led the Japanese in social organisation and technology for history up until the Meiji restoration and conclude that actually, all of that was just luck, and only 1860s and after really counts.
The Quing conquered China, and Manchuria looks to only be ~2x the size of Japan at the beginning of their conquest
The Qing also helpfully had much of the Ming military defect to them (Wu Sangui opening Shanhai Pass being the most famous, but many of the most capable officers had already defected as early as 1620-1630) as the Ming collapsed and the Shun was ransacking Beijing. Most of the military used by the Qing to defeat the Ming (and the generals formulating strategy) were ethnic Han, not to mention specialised troops like artillerists that the Jurchens didn’t have institutions for. Even then it took some 30 odd years from the unification of the Jurchens and conquest of Manchuria to the subjugation of the entire Chinese mainland, excepting remnants and Taiwan. (The Three Feudatories revolt shortly after was also an existential crisis for the Qing.)
It’s not really comparable.
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What's the actual HBD prediction, though? Can it actually be used to check against previous data?
Japanese are high-IQ, right? So why were they behind technologically? And sure, there's a whopping huge cultural explanation available, the Japanese had just recently left the iron age less than a century before... but claiming that "HBD is decisive except when it isn't" isn't actually all that useful. All the excuses for why cultural factors predominated seem entirely relevant, but then we're supposed to discard similar cultural factors from our current situation?
If the Japanese and German war efforts were so doomed, why were they stupid enough to throw themselves into a war they couldn't win?
I actually think it's considerably more likely than not that HBD is true. I continue to argue that it isn't useful, because it doesn't generate novel predictions. I don't need an HBD thesis to tell me that Blacks Less Likely; I can just look at fifty years of data from previous interventions to see that's clearly the most likely outcome from future interventions, especially if those interventions limit themselves to a particular cluster in theoretical space.
This is the way of scientific hypotheses. I don't need a theory of gravity to tell me that things will fall when dropped; I can just look at the history of things having fallen when dropped. But people want to know why.
Sure. But part of the "why" is definately environmental, because we can see significant short-term changes correlating with attempted interventions. Black marriage outcomes really did crater starting in the 60s. The black murder rate really has skyrocketed post-2020. If policies can make things worse, then fixing those policies can probably ameliorate the harm they caused, and that would be an improvement over the current state.
Scientific theories are useful when they give us actionable predictions. "If you do this, such and such will happen". It seems to me that HBD is short on actionable predictions, at least under anything approaching the existing situation. It gives us no constructive path forward, only a whole lot more conflict. Black people aren't going away, we do actually have to figure out how to share the country with them, and they are never going to accept permanent underclass status with no hope of a solution. I actually think that a lot of their problems are self-inflicted, and a lot more are caused by misguided Blue attempts at helping. But the "your racist" meme is, at this point, simply an axiom, and appeals to HBD won't fix that, so I think we're better off focusing on the way bad interventions have made things worse than on genetic explanations we can't actually do anything about.
HBD is absolutely necessary to respond to the Norwegian Prisons argument, i.e. the claim that disproportionate outcomes are proof of discrimination, and that category of argument can swallow the whole world if it does not have a ready response. That is more than ample justification for believing in HBD and promulgating its truth.
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This far overstates the case (and makes the extraordinary Meiji restoration even more incredible). We usually put the end of the Iron Age with the start of historiography, and Japan has had a tradition of organized states and written records for a good long while at that point.
Japan was also no stranger to gunpowder. the late Warring States period leading to the Tokugawa shogunate saw extensive and innovative use of guns; both the Ming and the Japanese under Toyotomi Hideyoshi, when fighting over Korea at the end of the 16th century, were well-armed with muskets, and both sides had understanding of tactics like volley fire.
That American gunboats far outstripped anything the Japanese had seen previously doesn’t mean they didn’t know what a gun was, just a recognition that their military technology is some two centuries dated.
All solid points. I guess a fairer comparison would be something like the renaissance, or perhaps the age of pike and shot?
Pike and shot would be fair, yeah.
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Because it was a desperate, last-gasp gamble for both of them. Starting a war usually is (unless you're a neocon).
The Japanese knew they were engaging on a high-risk venture with little chance of success. But they had been forced into a corner by FDR's steel and oil embargos. It was either strike now, or be assassinated by the ultranationalists they had been egging on. We actually have the minutes from the last imperial council meeting where they made the final decision for war and they're quite clear on this.
Hitler considered that there were too many Germans and not enough food to feed them. The soil was giving out, and what would happen then? Germany must rely on imports, and hence become yet another slave of the western bankers. Hitler always felt himself racing against time, and needed to strike quickly. Imagine if he wasn't so hasty and had an army of Tiger tanks and V2 rockets to start with.
This just seems to kick it back up a layer. Why did they find themselves in such a position? Why did the Japanese egg on the ultranationalists? Why didn't Hitler dedicate himself to, I don't know, fertilizer research, or try literally any other solution than aggressive war against an unbeatable enemy? Or just mortgage himself to the gills to the bankers, who if memory serves didn't have much of a problem with him pre-war, use the money to finish climbing the tech tree, and THEN go all Mongol horde on his creditors?
And this presumes they thought the war was unwinnable, which is really not the impression I've gotten from what history I've read.
This requires a broader understanding of how both theatres were going, and more importantly, the political climates that led Germany and Japan to war in the first place. I will mainly talk about Japan here, as I think someone else can probably do a better job illustrating the particulars of Hitler’s views on lebensraum.
In an attempt to be concise:
Edit:formatting
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They aren't any moreso than anyone else - there are a lot of poor drug addicts, being smart doesn't necessarily prevent you from being a drug addict, and the high levels of intelligence require a lot of randomness / non-additive genetic variation / other unknown (non-shared-environment) factors, so children of the smartest aren't as good on average, even though they're still smart. Coming apart at the tails etc, once you've milked all you can from currently-existing additive variation you can only get a lot better with something else.
I generics wasn’t heritable then we would see far more failed sons then we do now. General mean reversion in genetics explains the sons failure properly. If the son was just average ability like IQ 105 instead of mean reversion from a high ability person then we would see the son fail 99% of the time. Instead we have a lot of successful sons.
So agreeing with you and don’t believe his anecdotes makes any sense. Or his German argument since America was a similar race.
Why? Almost no-one disputes that outcomes are fairly heritable, many (including myself) would simply argue that it's mostly the advantages of a privileged upbringing that makes those outcomes heritable.
Well people disagree with that. That gets into the genetics versus heritable debate.
If natural IQ is the dominant factor in success and if IQ wasn’t heritable then there would be more failed sons. If an IQ 140 person was not heritable at all then on average their children would be IQ 105 and wouldn’t come close to parents achievements. Instead most believe in mean reversion and IQ 140 on average would be 130 on average and the sons would be accomplished on average but to a lesser degree.
Well that first part is a pretty crucial leg to the argument that you didn't mention. So in fact, we needn't necessarily see more failed sons is genetics had little to do with IQ, that's only true if one further concedes that there is such a thing as 'natural' IQ and that it is the dominant factor in success.
It seems likely traits are heritable. I don’t see evidence that it is false. While IQ is difficult to measure directly there are no doubt studies on height that show strong heritable in well fed populations.
Well two can play at that game, I don't see evidence that it's true.
So? Just because one characteristic is heritable, that doesn't imply that they all are. Especially when comparing something so clear cut as 'height' to something so murky and vague as 'intelligence'.
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I don't think genetic differences in race would mean that the Germans and Japanese would have to win. It's a factor that can help them, not a guarantee.
Besides, the argument obviously fails for Germans, because they killed or drove out their Jews. Jews have a high IQ and HBD would tell you that getting rid of them is a bad idea.
Would it? Of course it was an evil thing to do for other reasons, but the Nazis didn't persecute the Jews because they thought they were stupid, they did it because they considered them to be dangerous. Jews showing smarts could only make them seem more threatening.
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At least make your argument internally consistent. Hitler considered the Anglos to be cousins from a common Germanic stock, i.e.:
So those "Mongrel Sons of Quakers", as I remember you calling them awhile ago when explaining the pleasure you took from thinking about German cities being firebombed by the Allies, were of a very similar racial stock as the Germans.
The Anglos and Russians beating the Axis powers is not exactly an indictment of HBD. Unless you're trying to presuppose the History Channel level of analysis which may suggest that the Allies won the war because of the Tuskegee airmen or something.
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They didn't. Losses on the Allied side were way, way, way higher. Especially on the Eastern front, where the Russians eventually won because they quite simply had more peasants than the Germans had bullets.
Germany and Japan are relatively tiny, with few natural resources. The Russians had essentially limitless cannon fodder, while the US and the British Empire combined had essentially limitless natural resources. Any war becomes a war of attrition if it goes on long enough. As the Finns also found when fighting the Russians, you can kill the enemy ten to one, but that's no good if the enemy always has an eleventh man.
As far as HBD is concerned, Germany's biggest blunder was an anti-IQ move. The persecution of the Jews caused a huge brain drain, both of e.g. Jewish professors and intellectuals themselves and of their colleagues, long before the Holocaust proper started. The Nazis kicked out people like Albert Einstein, who went over to the US. It's thanks to the smarts of people like those, that the US managed to develop the nuclear bomb and force Japan to surrender. Without it, it would certainly have taken a lot longer.
Russia is not part of "the anglosphere."
Further, all war since the industrial revolution has been trending against the concept of numerical superiority. "Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun and they have not." Modern warfare has repeatedly generated completely lopsided kill ratios.
China evidently does real well in the IQ games, and they didn't have the disadvantage of discovering the industrial revolution fifty years late. Yet they were a complete basket-case, and spent world war 2 primarily in the role of "victim". Japan does real well in the IQ games, and they got absolutely wrecked. India has no shortage of high-IQ individuals, but their society was a mess then and is still quite a mess now.
IQ: "70% of the time, it works every time." Is that meant to be the takeaway? It's decisive except in those situations where it isn't decisive which can't be predicted in advance?
Sorry, what? Mass production of guns is what enables mass armies, it's a lot faster to learn to use gun than sword or bow (which required life dedication to efficiently use).
Completely lopsided kill ratios existed well before Maxium gun. Historically horses chariots were a big game changer too. Battle of Otumba, etc.
that's both unkind and untrue. The Soviets had numerical advantage but not that much. 170 million USSR in 1939 vs 80 million Third Reich (and what if you count only ethnic Russians)? . Considering how much better was German war machine than Soviet (in part, because of Stalin cleansed nearly all military leadership and officers) it wasn't impossible target.
For country of 1.5 billion, they do have a shortage.
Mass armies matter when you have rough parity in technology and tactics. Sure, lopsided victories have existed for much of human history, but the industrial revolution really turbocharged the process to an absurd degree. Notably, technology and tactics are areas where we would naively expect IQ to deliver outsized results.
...It also doesn't seem to be a claim I made. The post above was conflating "The Allies" with "The Anglosphere", as though the former were equivalent to the later.
Is the per-capita number what's important, or the absolute numbers?
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Yes they did. "Especially on the Eastern front" is woefully underselling things, half a million US casualties and another million from the British commonwealth is a drop in the bucket compared to the 8 - 12 million soviets (depending on who's numbers we trust), and the question must be asked just how many of those death's were a product of the Soviet Union's rather "cavalier" attitude towards spending human lives.
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First, citation needed (no, other than Hunter).
Second, it must also be shown that the process of becoming an «elite», i.e. a member of the political class, is substantially meritocratic. Perhaps political animals pass through some other pipeline than one requiring merit of the kind incompatible with drug addiction and stupidity. I do not observe high rates of idiocy and drug addiction among the progeny of liberal academic elite you love to sneer at so much; rather, children of tenured math profs tend to become math adjuncts or maybe quants at Jane Street, as the regression to the mean predicts. And they do more to build up a great nation than Bidens and Trumps.
Lmao no they didn't, and that's not starting to discuss industrial capacity and, more to the point, general human capital.
You are an undisciplined thinker, which I suppose is in your eyes a fair tradeoff for another kind of discipline. You seem to equate HBD with particular self-serving German National Socialist beliefs, which irrationally posited superiority of German stock over other peoples of the world (and Yamato subjects had their own sort of racial hubris, grounded more in their legitimate successes in recent major wars than in some theoretic HBD scholarship). By the end of the war Germans have «discovered» that not only are Anglos perfectly capable of matching their Teutonic spirit or whatever, but that even Slavs aren't inept Mongoloids like they came to believe.
Here's Himmler whining about it:
You're straight up wrong. Like the Nazis were.
Come on now, this is peak PoMo. Wokes predict that diversity breeds success, they have pseudo-mathematical papers on that.
P.S. How's that diversity and disorganization working out for Russian Federation right now?
P.P.S. A Borderer descendant talking about the lack of warrior tradition, that's rich.
I'm afraid Hlynka still doesn't understand regression to mean
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Jeb Bush, Matthew Yglasias, Liz Cheney, and yes Hunter Biden. When comparing the current scion of a political dynasty to that dynasty's founder there is rarely any comparison. And for what it's worth "elites" being selected on something other than intelligence as you suggest here would itself be a body blow to the HBD advocates' claims.
Yes they, they kind of did. On the German side in the Autumn of 1939 the BF-109 and FW-190s were qualitatively superior to any fighter available to the opposition ditto the Panzer IIIs and IVs on the ground. Further more Germany's professional NCO and JO Corps (inherited from the Prussians) meant that their crews generally had far more time and practice in their vehicles than their mostly conscripted opponents. They also enjoyed an approximate parity in numbers. Likewise on the Japanese side the A6M was easily the match of anything the Americans or Brits could field in the winter of '41 and the US Pacific Fleet had rather famously (infamously) allowed things like live fire training and regular testing/maintenance of equipment to slide in favor of "looking pretty on parade", leading to notable under-performance in the early phases of the war even if we discount the "sucker punch" effect of Pearl Harbor.
What Himmler seems to be whinging about, is the Nazis' inability to keep up the façade.
In other words he's complaining whinging about guys like me being proven right. "Culture", "grit", and "General Motors" really do matter more than your old-world notions of racial purity/destiny.
The Woke conflate diversity of skin color with diversity of opinion, background, class, etc... because their whole ideology is built around their belief in the maximal importance of race. This is why when a hard-core progressive get's red-pilled they have a tendency turn into whacky ethno-nationalists like Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, or our very own @SecureSignals, than anything resembling a republican. Being as deeply ensconced in the progressive bubble as they are, they simply lack the historical and cultural context to truly free their minds from the woke matrix.
Putin and his Vatniks are mid-20th-century fascists in all but name and they are loosing for the same reason. They put way too much stock in thier own perceived superiority and their opponents perceived weakness, and now they are paying for it in blood.
I am merely repeating what others have said about us. And on one hand they are correct, there is nothing in my ancestry that compare to the centuries long traditions of the Japanese Samurai or the Prussian Army, that said what we do have is a history of irrational defiance.
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What are you talking about? Pz 3&4 were worse than T-34 and they were unable to penetrate armor of KV-1 heavy tanks, Germany started to use heavy tanks noticeably later and in small quantities because they were overengineered. The only thing better was radios, and that every tank was equipped with it rather than select ones (in Soviets).
Americans didn't need to put much effort in tanks because tanks weren't useful in terrain where they fought Japanese.
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Should be fixed now.
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Do have evidence that they're disproportionately idiots and drug addicts? I strongly expect the opposite.
The Allies had more than double the GDP of the Axis powers every year of the war. I don't think anyone has ever claimed that racial differences (if they exist) can trump a 2x advantage in production. It was even more lopsided regarding raw population counts. Even beyond that you're attempting to infer causation (or lack thereof) based on a correlation of n=2. That's absurd.
Re intelligence, the difference between the average SAT score from the poorest families and the richest families is about 2 z-scores - ditto for parental educational attainment. SAT scores correlate strongly with IQ, so the idea that the children of elites are idiots seems obviously false.
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Re drugs - I did some googling:
tl;dr - among teens/young adults
low SES predicts more smoking
high SES predicts more alcohol and marijuana
the evidence is unclear for harder drugs
A 2009 meta-analysis found
A 2010 study found
A 2012 study found
Another 2012 study found
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If racial purity is supposed to lead to superior intelligence and intelligence is supposed to result in greater production (amongst other things) what does Germany and Japan falling way behind on production tell us?
If being a superior athlete and cross-country runner is supposed to result in higher speeds, why do I outperform Usain Bolt whenever I hop into my car and drive? What does it tell us that despite Usain Bolt having a significant genetic advantage when it comes to athletic performance, he falls way behind on speed compared to me?
If you think that the HBD position is that higher average IQ for a given ethnicity is enough to overcome any and all other differences in context then I think you need to go and do some more research before you can credibly claim to understand the position you're arguing against.
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You keep strawmanning your opponents with an appeal to the Nazi-esque notion of racial purity. Maybe it has place in your internal version of ye Olde Worlde intellectuals. Maybe it even has merit. But it's a misrepresentation. Nobody here, far as I can tell, cares much for purity per se; HBD of the sort discussed in this thread is about quality (or rather, quantitative measures of specific qualities), and quality can be found in any race (albeit to unequal extent), and does not disappear upon admixture. Germano-Japanese mixes wouldn't have been inferior to the real unspoiled deal any more than your Anglo-Germanic pals proved to be. In fact one needs no genetics to recognize this truth.
I don't think it's a strawman at all. I think that "intelligence is heritable from parent to child" is the proverbial motte and that "and that's why we need to do away with all this anti-scientific nonsense about all men being created equal and replace it with the 14 words" is the bailey and that the vast majority of the HBD advocates here on the motte are very much in the baily.
Has it ever occurred to you that you're just paranoid? «IQ is heritable from parent to child and this is why we need to brain drain East Asia, also my wife is Han Chinese» sounds more like it.
It's not "paranoia" if there are lions about.
There's two parts to your position, ironically a sort of Motte-and-Bailey in itself. Part 1 is that you suspect that HBD is a slippery slope to Nazism, not too crazy a concern. Part 2 is that you suspect that virtually all HBD proponents here are already nearing the bottom of said slope, which is where the conflict reaches flashpoint. Part 1 is at least intuitively, directionally correct. Part 2 is the part that is in dispute because it's underdetermined.
For what it's worth, I think we could do with less drum-beating about HBD here. I think it doesn't matter a super-ton in the end, only that it appears that way because our institutions have somehow managed to 50-Stalins themselves about Affirmative Action and equality-of-opportunity. When that sort of thing happens, especially somewhere like America, it's perhaps all too easy to subscribe to a theory that tells you that the entire human race is throwing itself off a cliff. What I would give to learn how the Second and Third Worlds perceive these First World developments.
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They were not way behind on production per person, which really ought to be the far more relevant metric to evaluating HBD.
But this is all moot, because, again, you are using a lack of correlation to infer a lack of causation, and you are using n=2. That is sloppy reasoning and can't let you draw any conclusions.
Sorry I'm muddying your rigorous analysis with silly things like logic.
Yes, that is exactly what I'm doing. While correlation does not prove causation, causation requires correlation, which is why the two are so often conflated.
In symbolic terms; if A is always found in the presence of B, this does not prove that A causes B. B could instead cause A, or both B and A could be a product of a third unidentified factor C. However if A does in fact cause B, "If A then B" will be a logically true statement, and thus lack of correlation (IE A in the absence of B) is actually very strong evidence against causation.
Wrong.
Causation does not require correlation.
Consider the causal network
B = A
C = -A
D = B+C
There will be no correlation between B and D, even though B causes D.
An HBD advocate might say IQ causes greater output/capita but fewer people (via lower birth rates). This would cause an unknown correlation between IQ and total GDP.
Moreover, again, a correlation with n=2 is not even good evidence of correlation - especially when you are literally cherrypicking to prove your point.
This might be a language barrier issue but that is not what you wrote. An equality is not an implication, and implications are not commutative.
That said I think I understand what you're trying to say and I don't think it matters. As like I said to @sansampersamp by acknowledging the presence of a 3rd unidentified factor that can overpower heritability you've effectively falsified the the bulk of the HBD-advocate's claims and rendered their policy proscriptions moot.
In the above, I'm using equality in the way typical in programming, not mathematics. Setting B = A, then setting C = -A, then setting D = B+C. In this way, any change to B causes a change to D. This is one of the two most common ways to use the "=" symbol across countries and languages.
Indeed, it's probably worth pointing out that causation is not an implication - a distinction you seem unclear on.
Even ceding everything else, how can the mere existence of a factor that can occasionally have a larger effect than genes, "falsify" HBD? Like, an HBD-advocate might think a black man will statistically beat an asian man in a fight due to being geneticlly stronger. If you give an asian man a gun and they shoot a black man, how exactly have you disproven HBD?
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As a formal note, causation does not require correlation. Consider speed as a function of how much a car's accelerator pedal is depressed, and look at someone going up and down hills while keeping to the speed limit. The car's speed is not correlated to how much the pedal is depressed despite the obvious causal link.
Slope of the road in this case would be the third unidentified factor C. And in any case the a third factor having a greater effect than genetics does infact prove the HBD advocates wrong.
Nope, it doesn't.
Suppose (numbers random for sake of example)
QoL depends on phenotypic IQ & how good government is. Phenotypic IQ depends on genetic IQ and QOL.
PIQ = GIQ + QOL
QOL = 0.3 * PIQ + 0.7 * government quality
Yes government seems more important looking at coefficient, but ultimately government is function of genetic IQ too, just in more complex and indirect way.
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I don't really want to weigh in on this actual debate one way or another, I just got nerd sniped via the all comments feed.
(note also that the third factor being the slope in the road is also not correlated with the speed, despite a causal link -- these self-regulating scenarios are common in biology, signals, etc, think body temperature)
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Same answer as before: 1) It helps, but it doesn't magically overcome all other difficulties, and 2) Jews are high IQ and the Germans got rid of them.
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Typically meaningless tactic for dismissing points you don’t like. A lot of whining
I would be very, very surprised by this. Is this actually true? Are children of the top 10% actually lower IQ and more frequently addicted to drugs than the bottom decile?
I don’t think any HBD advocate claims that by accepting HBD you automatically win all wars regardless of other factors
That doesn't necessarily make the accusation false.
From my experience the children of the top 10% are generally no smarter than anyone else and substantially more likely to be drug users of some kind, though how much of this is simple availability + opportunity is unclear.
In any case you don't need to compare them to the bottom decile to falsify HBD, just the decile immediately below them if genetics really does have a far greater effect than culture, upbringing, geography, etc... we should see a substantial difference between the children of the top 10% and the top 20% and that's not something anyone has been able to demonstrate.
No they claim that racial purity and homogeneity lead to superior outcomes and then get pissy when you point out historical counter-examples.
HBD advocates claim that if you mix two populations of same size, IQ of mix would be very close to average of these ancestral populations. Don't they? What does this have to do with racial purity?
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"Lead to superior outcomes" means "lead to superior outcomes, compared to not having it". It doesn't mean "leads to superior outcomes compared to everything, all the time." And racial purity is not HBD. Nazis killing Jews is "racial purity", but HBD says not to do that.
Equivocation. The HBD advocates central claim that heritability/genetics trumps culture, economics, geography etc... is falsified if it doesn't actually trump culture, economics, geography etc...
No, they don't. This is a strawman (or maybe a weakman if you can find one guy on Twitter who says it).
And your idea that HBD is okay with getting rid of Jews, who are high IQ, is bizarre. HBD isn't actually racial purity, and this is one of the differences between it and racial purity.
You're conflating the rationalists' fetishization of IQ with HBD, they are two seperate premises.
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That is not "the HBD advocates central claim". The central claim is that human subpopulations differ in their distribution of various phenotypical characteristics besides superficial physical ones, most notably intelligence. And that these subpopulations are meaningfully broken up along gross racial lines.
You're wrong, This is absolutely the median HBD advocate's on theMotte's central claim. It's why you think it's racist to suggest that black couples should stay together for the sake of their kids, and why the OP is going on about "failed attempts at uplift".
Those who believe that it is racist to suggest that black couples should stay together for the sake of their kids are not HBD advocates. They are progressive Democrats. They are the ones who determine what is considered "racist" in the US today, however. As for "failed attempts at uplift"... the phrasing is obnoxious to the point of trollish, if you're familiar with Brin's "Uplift" series. But that attempts have been made to improve the outcomes of the American black population and nearly all have failed miserably is plain fact.
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