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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33487 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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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

  • -11

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.

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.

You keep strawmanning your opponents with an appeal to the Nazi-esque notion of racial purity.

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.

  • -13

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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you are using a lack of correlation to infer a lack of causation

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.

even though B causes D.

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.

More comments

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.

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)

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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