This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Briefly: Because academia and industry were quite meritocratic - in order to effectively discover things or invent things or make profit - and this has led to, in large part, those who are smartest and most capable succeeding. In math, you really do, in large part, just need to be very smart and prove impressive things to become a famous mathematician. Even if you're an indian, or asian, or brown, disabled, etc. And at points in history libraries, the internet, mail, international travel, and the modern economy has made it very possible for someone to, just by virtue of intelligence or capability, succeed on one's own by using resources available to anyone, or changing circumstances, location, company one keeps, etc.
Right, but this didn't happen to f.ex jews - they're uniformly successful across chem, physics, math, bio, etc. And - how would this happen? You're "black", but you ... work at a university, in the mixed racial environment, you marry an asian uni professor, your kids go to the local school, maybe the local "good" school... and it's gone quickly. Similarly for jewish culture! Yet atheist jews continue to succeed everywhere.
But the GI bill isn't why 20-30% of americans today go to college! And those blacks could just go to the library, self-study, or make friends with like-minded coders on the internet. I've become good friends with many extremely smart people just by shared interest in complex topics. I don't know any mottizens particularly well, but themotte is another example - smarter people congregate here out of desire to do specific things with other intelligent people.
How disproportionately? Even if 80% of blacks had so much iodine deficiency they were retarded, that'd still not help the argument, the other 20% could still win nobel prizes - and, they aren't. (obviously, segregation and slavery etc are factors then, it's much easier to argue about the state of the present day)
Again, how disproportionately? That's at most gonna be like a 30% effect, and many jews living in lead-infused cities still won nobel prizes. (Which is a confusing thing about lead poisoning, what exactly are its effects on intelligence given that so many smart people coexisted with it? Obviously there were smart people in 1500 and there was a lot more bringing down intelligence then than just lead, so lead def has a negative effect, but interesting)
Anyway, the main thrust of my argument for HBD here was jewish overrepresentation, not black underrepresentation.
(also, it doesn't make much sense that you'd have such stark differences in genetic iq within populations, visible ... i mean compare you and your parents to joe the plumber and his parents, pretty clear, also plenty of heritablity studies and GWASes ... and then for that to not transfer to larger-scale populations over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution)
I know people whose grandparents were exclusively impoverished farmers running from conflict, and their parents immigrated to the Us / europe / their countries sped through industry, and their parents succeeded in school and industry just by being smart, and now they're incredibly smart as well.
More options
Context Copy link