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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32835 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I'm thinking about the trans rights debate.

How is asking women to give up their spaces for trans women different to how we asked white people to give up their segregated spaces to people of color back in the day?

  • -17

Did you mean "white people and black people more likely"?

I accidentally posted the comment before finishing typing it, meant to delete it and start over, but apparently deleting it didn't take. Silly me

A lot of people are picking at your analogy in ways in which the two situations you described are different. And their answers are correct for there are some differences depending on along which axis you want to find the differences in.

However here's a different point of view. They are not different at all. And them being the same or different doesn't really matter. In other words, conflict theory is a much better predictor of the CW than mistake theory. (I don't assert one ought to be better than the other, merely that one is)

Its a conflict between the people that want a separation and those who don't. They will fight with words and memes and legislation. Both sides will tell you why it ought to be their way, but they are fighting for what is.

Yeah, that's where I couldn't square it in my head.

If course the two groups are different.

But the ask is similar: one group has to give something up so the other group can have something.

That's what I couldn't square off in my head.

And them being the same or different doesn't really matter.

That's another asymmetrical measure.

Whether the differences matter affects whether the attack is justified, and this is actually important.

I'm not a moral relativist so you are not going to get an argument out of me on that. I agree broadly that there are principally consistent ways around which to structure culture/institutions. And some of those ways are better than others, especially if they are self consistent. But in the vibes based world we live in right now,

Day by day I am more attracted to the the really dumb heuristic of "side A finds side B's ideas icky and wants side B to fuck off and die because the TV said as much" really attractive. You will still be left with a really good model that predicts much of the CW.

How is asking women to give up their spaces for trans women different to how we asked white people to give up their segregated spaces to people of color back in the day?

Because black women can have children and transwomen can't.

Race expression is mostly immaterial compared to sex expression, which is more than self-identification at the end of the day. If you want to extend a test to transwomen beyond self-identification, you've a pretty minority opinion among Trans-Rights-Activists.

Your analogy does not really work at all. Racial segregation was not about providing white people with their own space; it was about excluding black people from otherwise public spaces, often because they were seen as polluting or unworthy in some way. Note also that early Jim Crow laws "classified Asian Americans, Native Americans, and all other people who were not Black—either explicitly or by default—as members of the 'white race.'"

In contrast, the purpose of women only "spaces" -- be they bathrooms or sports teams -- is to provide women with their own spaces. it is not about excluding a group deemed unworthy.

That makes more sense. Thanks.

YW

is to provide women with their own spaces. it is not about excluding a group deemed unworthy.

What is the difference between "Whites Only", and "Non-whites not welcome"? Or is there another distiction you are making here?

I didn't actually say that there is a difference between "Whites Only", and "Non-whites not welcome". But since you asked, historically they meant the same thing, obviously: They meant "non-whites not welcome." But, logically they don't have to be the same [edit: i.e, ethnically the same. I take OP as having made an ethical claim], if the purpose of the two rules are different. Because I thought it was pretty clear that the distinction was in regard to the intent behind the laws/rules/whatevers in the OP's analogy. That's why I said that Jim Crow "was about excluding black people from otherwise public spaces, often because they were seen as polluting or unworthy in some way" and that in contrast, giving women their own spaces "is not about excluding a group deemed unworthy."

So, a current rule that said, "whites only allowed in this room" because for some reason only whites need the services provided in that room is not the same as a rule that said "non-whites not welcome" because nonwhites are deemed and inferior.

I think the idea meant to be is that women are inherently weaker and/or in some way less safe around men in a way that whites aren't comparatively to blacks. That the segregation is done for protection rather than... aesthetic? reasoning.

Liken it to boxing weight tiers, if you like. Segregate the heavyweights so they don't accidentally kill the featherweights.

Why do sex-segregated spaces exist in the first place?

Because some places are private and thus by design everything going on there is a he-said-she-said. We don't like rape and non-consensual groping, so we go about in ways to reduce them. Gender segregated private areas is the least bad solution to this problem.

On top of that, women, in the feminist age, wanted to have access to some traditionally male activities for things like developing leadership skills, fitness, etc. They would have no hope to not be crushed in the competition (and severely injured in most) without gender segregation.

Toilets: because women don't want to disrobe/defecate in places where men will (at best) hit on them

Sports: because women would be excluded from competition in all but a handful of sports like target shooting and long-distance swimming

In short, because there are real physical and mental differences between male and female that necessitate segregation at times if "equality of opportunity" is a goal. Mixed-sex sports means almost no women get to be professional athletes. Mixed-sex toilets (unless single stall) mean women in practice will never leave the house without a chaperone. "Whites only" is not about giving whites equal opportunities but excluding blacks from opportunities/public life, and giving them inferior alternatives. "Use the (inferior) black fountain" is not the same as "use the (perfectly fine) male toilet".

If you mean in general, all societies have deemed various places the proper/improper place of one sex or another, whether it be kitchens, the outdoors, the sporting field, the birthing room, the tabernacle, etc. We have decided that the public world at large must be open to women, so we have created female-only toilets so they may go about in public.

The sport example is terrible. Olympic swimming excludes pretty much all black people due to genetic factors, but we don't have an equivalent Olympic category for just "black people" with the same level of prestige as the open competition, but for some reason women get their own league...

Someone should probably alert Cullen Jones to this development. I nominate you.

I did not know this. Apparently black successful olympic swimmers do exist, but equally there's this really tall Chinese basketball dude while I'd say that on average the Chinese are not the best suited for Basketball due to their smaller heights.

Anyways: we don't have a special Olympic category for short (under 5'6") male rowers (lightweight rowing exists but those people are still 6'+) while we do for women. Shortness is almost as genetically determined as being female.

Perhaps Burdensome is channeling Al Campanis

If true, I would imagine there certainly could be genetic factors. Similar to how pretty much every single 100 meter gold medalist in the past 30 years has been of recent African ancestry.

Lung volume for instance, Phelps was exceptional partly because of his exceptional lung volume and upper body shape.

There are bone density differences between the races, so yeah bouancy may well differ because of genetics.

Black people tend to have longer limbs and shorter torsos compared to white people, and having a long torso is beneficial for swimmers because you have less drag in the water. Michael Phelps is a good example of a swimmer with an extremely long torso.

https://www.usaswimming.org/meet-the-team/u.s.-olympic-team

There are still a number of black swimmers on the US team, so it's obviously not insurmountable.

Nowhere did I say Olympic. I'm sure there are national and below swimming competitions where black people could be reasonably competitive (assuming your claim is actually true, I have no idea, I assumed black people not being able to swim was just a meme). There is almost nowhere at the high school level and above where women can compete against boys, let alone men. There are also plenty of other sports where black men do fine/great (running, weightlifting, many team sports), whereas, again, there are maybe two or three things nobody really gives a shit about where women are even vaguely competitive with men. Black people are doing fine overall in the realm of sports even if they're disadvantaged in some, but without segregation the number of female athletes past elementary school would be very close to 0.

assuming your claim is actually true, I have no idea, I assumed black people not being able to swim was just a meme

The claim is false, and i suspect that the meme is driven (at least in part) by number of inner-city kids who join the Navy or Marine Corps and end up spending their first couple weeks of boot camp in remedial swim instruction because they've never been in water deeper than their waist. Go to an actual swim meet and you'll see a fair number of black and mixed guys competing just as you do in pretty much every athletic event.

If there's anything at all to this question, it'd be much better when elaborated in a few paragraphs at least, rather than just one provocative sentence. Good sounding thing [x] is superficially similar to bad sounding thing [y]. Did you know democrats want to SEGREGATE black people with affirmative action? Hitler also segregated. 10k comments, 5k quote tweets, 30k retweets, 50k likes.

Be careful - framing it like this is a good way to convince people Jim Crow laws were right.

The resistance of MtF to invading women spaces seems to be more widespread than against integration. And women actually deserve their own spaces where they can be themselves and away from the battle of the sexes. Bathrooms, locker room, man caves(for the gents) and ladies nights etc are important part of the social life.

There is no right of belonging to a group or acceptance in one.

And to give even more pragmatic answer - I value real women more, so if something makes them uncomfortable and is zero cost to me - I find it totally ok to support alleviation of said discomfort.

Because an extremely small minority of mentally ill people is not the same thing as black people under Jim Crow, and trans women are demanding access to the women's changing room is not black men under Jim Crow wanting to eat in the same restaurants as white men.

Being trans is not necessarily a mental illness, though gender dysphoria is listed as such. There are plenty of well-adjusted trans people living happy lives, at which point it's a difference, not a disease. It's worth mentioning homosexuality also used to be listed as a mental illness, but that was only because of social prejudice, and is no longer considered such.

It's not a disease but hormones, puberty blockers, surgeries are labeled "trans health care". The answer is of course that saying "trans health care" allows for asking for public financing of puberty blockers etc, but saying it's not a disease supposedly averts "stigma". Even though the woke seem to also advocate that mental illness and disability are not bad and shouldn't be stigmatized in the first place.

Last I checked, refusal to accept one’s own body was considered a mental illness in every other case(anorexia, those people who seek amputation because they believe they don’t have certain body parts, etc). The main difference as far as transgenderism is the political valency.

There are plenty of people with other mental illnesses that are happy and well adjusted. Alcoholics come to mind. Pedophiles and bestiality-practitioners would be in this category if their conduct was not stigmatized and illegal. That doesn't mean they aren't mental illnesses in general which we need to treat with a deterrence treatment, rather than an encouragement treatment.

That doesn't mean they aren't mental illnesses in general which we need to treat with a deterrence treatment

Sure, but why, in the case of trans? Alcoholism sucks, liver disease, it makes you dumb and act stupidly, etc. "There are plenty of well-adjusted trans people living happy lives" is intended to be an argument that most trans people could be 'well adjusted andhappy' (what does that mean, exactly) and there's no point in 'deterrence'.

Liver disease from alcoholism isn't all that much different in life reduction from hormone therapy + full transition surgeries. The resulting creations are a constant infection risk somewhat akin to an open wound, for the rest of the person's life. Plus, there is little evidence of affirmation actually reducing suicide rate, whereas the suicide rate does plummet for kids who give up on the notion before hormones and surgery.

So there is a massive gain to the individual if they are deterred. There is also a massive gain to society because the deterred is a healthy adult who can procreate.

A lot of trans people, maybe even a majority idk, just don't get SRS at all. That doesn't create an open wound!

It's "somewhat akin to an open wound". Well, how akin? What percent of people with SRS, ten years later - (there were a lot of people who got SRS years ago) - have severe complications today? I'd predict less than 20%.

And the person I know who had SRS doesn't seem to have any long-term medical problems from it.

Do you not think there is a fairly big gap between the quality of life of a transitioned trans person and a birth member of their desired gender(not just because of social factors)?

There aren't any good reasons for 'trans people' to transition in any case.

But I was asking OP to make a good argument for that, rather than just invoke 'mental illness', and non-illuminating claims about suicide or surgery.

Do you not think there is a fairly big gap between the quality of life of a transitioned trans person and a birth member of their desired gender

Not really? If you don't get SRS, which a lot of trans people don't, hormones just make you look ugly and it and voice training and such are a minor cost. I know many trans people who just seem normal and being trans is something they seem to 'benefit' from much more than it 'costs' them, if benefit and cost mean 'happiness' and 'quality of life'. But 'happiness' is just a person's judgement of what they're doing, is it really the same when soyface.jpg is happy about the new marvel movie as when wiles proved fermat's last theorem? Or even just when you have kids? (Arguably: yes, and all that proves is that happiness, itself, isn't worth anything, it's the actual thing that took place or was willed that matters, and that's the confusion). So - given that trans people just pursue images of useful things like signs of being able to have children, but don't do so in a useful or coherent way, being trans is bad. But ... it's honestly pretty similar to modern fashion, makeup, casual sex, and 'consumerism' in that sense. Which, leading nowhere and having no purpose - is just as bad.

"it makes you want to kill yourself at higher rates than Jews during the Holocaust" seems like a good reason to me.

I'm friends with a number of trans people and they basically never bring up suicide or how awful their lives are. They don't read, at all, as a jew during the holocaust. So this isn't plausible. If your goal is to 'ensure universal happiness, and allow all oppressed people to free themselves' - that isn't going to work for right wing ends, like saying 'trans people aren't happy and are oppressed by the schools and medicine'.

The statistics don't agree with your anecdote. Likely because of quite literal survivor bias.

Not enough trans people kill themselves for survivorship bias to matter? It'd need to be at least 20%, and the highest claim I ever saw was 5%.

A hundred times this. If you live in a city I bet you walk past at least one person with schizophrenia every day - not a homeless person (although plenty of the homeless are schizophrenic), a well dressed person going to work or shopping or whatever. You would have no idea, because they are managing their illness and are happy and well adjusted. But they are still schizophrenic, they are still mentally ill.

Everybody talks a good game about inclusion and destigmatising mental illness, but I have yet to see anything that doesn't convince me it is purely because of that stigma that trans people deny being mentally ill despite having an ailment that affects their minds.

Yeah I totally agree but it's a counterpoint that came into my head. So I had to ask.

I mean, I'll answer your question in a strictly political sense. Women are a protected class in a way that white people are not.

I think that's the long and the short of it. That's the core of the conflict, I think, and why this sort of thing is so nasty. We've set an expectation that asking women to give up their spaces is an anti-social thing to do. And people are fighting for that expectation to be met. But at the same time, we've also set an expectation that marginalized groups should be able to gain access to those sorts of things.

Essentially, what you're seeing is the Progressive Stack being actualized, and how it creates conflicts.

Now, I think it's more complicated than that, and there's a lot of moving parts (I strongly believe "The Movement" as they're calling it, or at least is my understanding I.E. the Gender Criticals, played a huge role over the last few decades in normalizing the Progressive Stack to the benefit of women. This alone makes things REALLY complicated I think)

I could go on a long discussion about what I personally believe...but I think it's irrelevant (something something eliminating protected classes and replacing them with a liberal focus on maximizing individual liberty and happiness). But understanding the underlying politics...that this is essentially people who model the world, on both sides, in strict oppressor/oppressed frames, and believe that the latter should gain absolute privilege over the former.

Note: This isn't all feminists or all trans people. I think this is the view of a relatively narrow slice of activists and influencers, for whom complexity over power dynamics in our society reveals some undesirable light onto the way we/they live.

Interesting.

So you're sort of saying (that people who believe this are saying), women are oppressed so to make up for that or fight it, they have been afforded certain things, like women only spaces or quotas, which sort of gives them help at a cost to their oppressors (men).

But this thinking also means that trans women are more oppressed than woman, so they deserve to get help, even at the expense of women, because while women are oppressed, they're not as oppressed as trans women?

So there's a hierarchy of oppression and it's OK to encroach on the rights of those above you in the hericachy, even if that group is being oppressed by the groups above them?

I'm not saying this is what you believe but what you said in your reply, dumbed down so I can understand it!

To make it more confusing, trans women also have all the rights of men, so not only are they higher up the heirachy than women, but they also want some of the spaces / benefit woman have?

Has anyone plotted out this heirachy?

The transwomen vs. women kerfuffle is the first time the opression spoils system resulted in tangible costs for women and the degradation of female privilege.

The first time women as a class have been but individual women have regularly be out oppressed by group sin other categories.

We asked white people to give up their segregated spaces to EVERYONE back in the day. Asking women to give up their spaces for trans women isn't asking them to give them up to EVERYONE, just an additional subset of people. A closer analogy would be if we asked categorically that no women-segregated - cis or trans - space ever exist.

Exactly, and specifically this means that there will be an incentive to misrepresent oneself as a woman (as identification grants access privileges). When blacks were allowed into formerly white spaces, there was no possibility or motivation for someone to misrepresent themselves.

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I'm thinking about the trans rights debate.

This is an almost perfect example of the sort of trollish "Hi I'm new here, Just Asking Questions" first-time-ever post that @HlynkaCG would say we should summarily drop a banhammer on. But you know what, we're not on reddit anymore, so sure, @TheGuy, I'll approve this post and, as yassine recently described, see if TheMotte takes your question seriously enough to produce quality responses.

FWIW, if you're really just some random newbie who's genuinely not sure if this is "the right place to ask" and just wants to share his shower thoughts (probability 2%), in the future please go to the effort of fleshing them out a bit, rather than just dropping a hot take that looks like someone "farming drama" (probability 98%).

Why are Americans falling behind in “brain-y” competitions? Or, if we haven’t fallen behind, why have we always been bad at them?

League of Legends is holding their Worlds competition, and most of the North American region teams did not make it past the first stage. The performance of NA teams has been poor compared to Chinese and Korean teams. The one NA team that has done okay is mainly comprised of non-Americans. The NA region actually has more players than the Korean region, and there are serious incentives to get a high-performing team together.

I have also noticed that in the chess world, most of the top grandmasters are first or second generation Americans. Despite only comprising 25% of Americans, they make up 19 of the top 20 players (only Sam Shankland afaik is the exception). It is not as if the immigrant competitors are all from the former Soviet Union or another chess-heavy region, either, but you find Italy, the Philippines, Japan, and China represented too. (Possibly, because Hispanics are so much of 1st/2nd gen but not represented in chess world, it could be more like 5% make up 95%.)

What explains the loss of American high achievers in intellectual competitions? Google Code has similar results, as does Overwatch. Could there be an environmental cause?

Spoilers! I'm disappointed. Are there rules about this?

NA has been a laughingstock in league for years. 0-9 is a new low, but most of the NA teams are full of imports - there are only 3 actual 'north american' players among the 15 players on NA teams. The most likely explanation is that we just don't have as large a playerbase, and also nebulous criticisms of NA 'culture' where washed up euros and koreans come over to get big paychecks and not try that hard.

Do you have historical data to indicate America is "falling behind" and not placing at the same level it has in those competitions previously?

It is certainly possible we’ve been consistently far behind, but the question of the cause remains

There are different priors embedded in "we were once Xth place but now are X+Nth place" than "we have always been Xth place but should for reasons be Yth place". The latter embeds a lot of notions of value that are not necessarily shared. Even if there were a decline it would have to be evaluated if it was simply relative performance loss or raw performance loss. Performing to the same technical level but other countries improving themselves to a higher level is different than declining in raw ability. Lots of unstated shoulds that come with unaccounted cost that have not been balanced against other needs and desires.

The NA region actually has more players than the Korean region, and there are serious incentives to get a high-performing team together.

Where are you getting this stat? It was never true during the Korean heydey a couple of years ago. Particularly when comparing ranked play.

America's computer game mediocrity is mostly attributable to console-culture (Japan also lags) and geography. The first means the American playerbase for most computer games is small compared to other countries, or is on the casual console version. The second means the average American has shit ping in online play. Back at launch, LOL's servers were in LA, which meant 80% of the US population was on over 70 ping.

Because both Chess and LoL are far far down in popularity in the US?

I mean, does the US not doing well in Soccer mean that it isn't athletic?

The original comment suggests that the US playerbase for LoL is higher than other nations. I would imagine that Chess also has the largest number of players coming from the US compared to other nations. Both are different from football, in which the US playerbase is dwarfed by other nations

Chess, LOL, and Soccer are all examples of competitions the US is bad at for, IMO almost the exact same reason: They require very high investment from children and teens, and have almost no benefit to you if you don't make it.

Other countries have less high of an upside for a smart and talented people going a conventional direction (and obviously less of a downside of failure because of more generous welfare states and less college enrollment, which means white collar women can't turn their noses up at plumbers and truckers like they do in the US), like investment banking or tech. American football and Basketball are nowhere near the skill expression of soccer and tennis, demonstrated by the many many pros who picked up the sport at something like age 16, so they are much easier for the dumb, but athletic to get into at any age.

So yeah, I don't think these things matter much on the big stage.

American football and Basketball are nowhere near the skill expression of soccer and tennis, demonstrated by the many many pros who picked up the sport at something like age 16, so they are much easier for the dumb, but athletic to get into at any age.

Dexterity and coordination required to be skilled in these sports is not all that much related to intelligence iirc, but fast processing speed is a skill rewarded by team sports that is well correlated with intelligence.

True, but if you go by the Wunderlic which the NFL famously used to administer to all incoming rookies, the average NFL player is slightly above the American average, ~105 IQ. But there are several position groups like running back and cornerback where the average IQ is far below 100.

NA has a larger player pool than Korea in League, and it is the most popular American e-Sport. If popularity dictated chess GMs, I do not think we would see an Italian, Norwegian, Chinese, and Dutchman among top players.

I’d blame incentives. The market for entertaining English-speaking LOL streamers outcompetes the LCS ecosystem so high-ELO NA games have lower stakes than scenes where all the money comes from getting a spot on a team. Also, on the margin, the median IQ of Korea and China are meaningfully higher than the US, so maybe the peak ELO is just higher over there despite the smaller player base.

On the other hand, the US does quite well in International Mathematical Olympiad, never coming up lower than 4th since 2009. Also 0 female competitors since 2008, which combined with mostly Asians being on the teams, shows that AA isn't yet enforced there.

This is why mediocre national test scores are not that big of a deal. What matters is the top .01% or so of talent, and that is where the US seems to excel in terms of absolute and total talent. America's schools and universities attract the best talent from all over the world even if most students are unexceptional, or wokeness not withstanding.

This is why mediocre national test scores are not that big of a deal. What matters is the top .01% or so of talent

Everyone gets one vote. I think a low-intelligence median voter is a BFD. It takes actually quite a lot of sophistication in the scheme of things to understand that, e.g., raising the minimum wage to $50/hr won't make everyone rich.

That’s remarkable that in 2021, Ukraine was not too far from America’s ranking.

https://www.imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2021

It’s also strange that Russia can beat America with their own population, eg no Koreans /Chinese

Why would it be strange?

Because Russia has half the population of America, and is poorer. “Why do native-born Americans not perform as well as either newer immigrants or Russians?” is the strange phenomena.

It's mostly legacy of the communist era educational system. In every big city the gifted kids were funneled into dedicated stem schools and the creme de la creme in regional and national ones.

As a graduate of one of those - the stuff there was hardcore and we were weaklingas compared to the people that were there before the commmunism fall.

Being poorer is an asset, not a drawback, at competing in things which most wealthy people dont find worth doing. It drives down your opportunity cost.

This is a just-so story. Most poor nations do not perform very well. India, Malaysia, Bangladesh. And in America the poor do not perform well. Korea and China are not particularly poor, if we’re looking at math Olympiads. The greatest chess players right now (Carlsen, Nakamura) all had wealthy families and opportunity.

The implied point is that given same IQ, poverty is advantage for math contests.

Math is low, very low status.

America-born individuals very much prefer going into positions where they can exploit value of labor by foreign-born high IQ individuals. They don't need math.

What explains the loss of American high achievers in intellectual competitions?

Does video/computer games count as an intellectual competition? I think cultural differences may explain this. Competitive computer games are very popular in Asia.

Call of Duty and CounterStrike, no IMO. But MOBAs require quick, intelligent application of pattern-matching.

That's just what AIs are good at right now, don't confuse it with intelligence.

Who would win, a team of 20 APM guys who know what all the abilities do or a team of 200APM former starcraft players that have never played a moba before? Similarly, is a clock win in bullet chess a good measure of chess skill? Kinda right? But in both cases being quick is more effective than being smart for the majority of the bell curve.

Intelligence can be measured separately from processing speed, but they are strongly correlated - processing speed explains 80% of the variation in intelligence. So to a first approximation the faster team is smarter. Edit: added link.

the way i see it for bullet chess at least, there's a skill/intelligence floor you have to clear so that you can see valid non disaster moves. Beyond that literally just moving the pieces faster is more valuable until you get to an Elo where people are actually trying to mate. Your point is true but mechanical speed seems like a distinct quality.

processing speed explains 80% of the variation in intelligence

Citation? This is equivalent to saying the correlation between IQ and reaction time is r^2=0.8. Studies I found with trivial googling suggest this claim if false:

Is general intelligence little more than the speed of higher-order processing?

Here we show in a sample of 122 participants, who completed a battery of RT tasks at 2 laboratory sessions while an EEG was recorded, that more intelligent individuals have a higher speed of higher-order information processing that explains about 80% of the variance in general intelligence.

Note that this is "speed of higher-order information processing" which is not the same as reaction time.

Ahh, fascinating - thank you!

I’m not sure what you mean. League is not a game of fast reflexes or spamming abilities. What separates good from bad players is prediction and calculation based on memorized patterns, similar to chess. In chess, all of the top players under 30 are also fantastic at bullet and blitz. Some of the top players in league have taken reaction time tests and aim tests, and they’re not an extreme outlier or anything.

20 APM is a bit low, but at 50 APM (reasonable for average players) the people who know the game would win 99% of the time if the 200APM people had literally never played a MOBA before (talking about DOTA here). We even have empirical proof of this because pros sometimes play on far away servers with 150ms+ ping and they still destroy average players.

If you want a real life example recently Grubby (a former WC3 pro) with excellent micro skills picked up DOTA and despite extensive coaching when he calibrated for ranked matchmaking he was put into Herald 5, roughly at the 10th percentile, and this was with hundreds of hours of play too, not "just picked the game up" noob level.

Fair, i did pick a ridiculously low APM to make my argument sound better. Going off of what coffee said upstream though, all of the gamesense/pattern matching stuff matters in CSGO as well, its just that the mechanical floor for when it starts mattering thats different.

I have a good number of friends who had pretty good results in programming competitions like Google Code Jam (think, top 5 scorers). They come from an Eastern European country, and, most probably, they are more intelligent than basically anyone you have ever personally met. Among them, they boast dozens of IOI/IMO/ICPC medals etc. Top tiers of sheer brainpower, by quote objective standards.

Here is something to understand about them: based on their individual background, those international competitions were some of the best options to gain success and status available to them at the time. After these competitions, they went on to become grad students at Harvard, Columbia, CMU and the like, and/or got a job at top FAANGs, making $500k today (roughly a decade after their competition successes). These options simply weren’t open (or even, for that matter, conceivable) to many of them when they were honing their competition skills way back in high school, or freshmen years at university, purely because your options are much more limited in second or third tier countries.

Now compare this to the options available to a highly intelligent and driven American young adult. Is try-harding at these objective merit-based competitions worth it? Not really: you will be competing against literally billions of people across the world, and your inborn advantage of being born in US, the land of many opportunities, will help you very little.

The more typical way of succeeding in current day America, which is getting to an elite college, are in fact conflicting with tryharding at competitions: practicing for those will take a lot of your time, which could be more effectively spent on honing items that will look better on your college applications. Quite simply, foundational Americans have better ways of enjoying success and status than these competition.

This is even better seen in those gaming competitions, which are dominated by lower class people from poor countries, as for them, spending 12+ hours a day playing video games have lowest opportunity cost. I would never allow my son to even try to get into that “career”.

This is also why Soviet science was such high quality: for the top people, there was little way to achieve success “in the industry”, and so the position of university professor was relatively really good compared to potential earnings and responsibilities you’d have at a high level position in some state owned enterprise. The wage and status differential was not huge. Compare this to today’s enormous differential between what you can make in US academia, vs the industry, and note also the incentives of US immigration system on foreign researchers (I can expand on this at some other occasion).

note also the incentives of US immigration system on foreign researchers (I can expand on this at some other occasion).

I'd appreciate reading this if you do end up writing it. I presume you're in math/CS?

I am working in tech industry, and don't have much personal experience in US academia, so this will be mostly based on experiences of my friends and family, and my knowledge of intricacies of US immigration system (the legal one, that is).

The typical wage of US postdoc researcher (and these are the ones who do most of the actual work) is something like $50-60k. Entry level positions are often in low-to-mid $40k, and salaries below that are not unheard of. These are all people with PhDs, not necessarily extremely smart (like my friends I mention above), but nevertheless significantly more intelligent than an average person earning six figures, and at least as driven and conscientious. How is that possible?

The answer is quite simple: these position are filled with mostly foreign researchers. They come here on J1 or H1B visas (occasionally on O1, but that's less common among junior researchers), and are tied to their PI and their lab to a very high degree. On J1, they literally cannot change they job, and on H1B, they can only switch to another research job, they cannot leave and go writing ad targeting code for FAANG. Even if they want to switch lab, that's usually not very easy. The job market is much smaller, based on recommendations, so their PI can completely torpedo their career if they so choose, making them beholden to their whims. And I haven't even mentioned the two body problem, affecting the scientists very acutely.

This means that the foreign researchers are, to a large degree, indentured servants of the labs they work for. This is not to say that they are exploited: no, they are typically rather fine with the arrangement, given that they can always go back to their home country, but nevertheless chose it, being mostly aware of its realities, and stay here. This is rather similar to the original indentured servants back in the day. The point is that the realities of what awaits them back home, along with the incentives that the immigration temporary work authorization system (H1B and most other employment visas were not meant result in immigration, indeed, before the invention of the legal fiction of "dual intent" policy, applying for a green card while on H1B resulted in not being to return to US if you leave it before you obtain the GC) highly reduce the pool of options available to them once they're here, and make foreign researchers being highly attractive, captive workforce for the research organizations.

Is this a falsifiable hypothesis?

those international competitions were some of the best options to gain success and status available to them at the time

Korotkevich from Belarus dominates programming competitions — ostensibly he has already attained maximum status and opportunity many times over as he has been the winner for years for Google Code. This is weak evidence against the motivational theory, because he seems to just want to dominate the competition. And indeed, chess players too generally just like dominating the competition, as a reward in its own fight. The second and third math Olympiad winners are Chinese and immigrant Canadian, so they’re in the top 2% of world opportunity. If “desiring opportunity” were the motivator we would see more winners from India, Malaysia, Bangladesh. The only non-Asian American winner, Reid Barton, came from a wealthy well-connected family.

Sure, some indeed actually dedicate their lives to these kind of competitions, but this is not big fraction of the people partaking, and even their career is not that long. They usually move on from there to more typical places of status. I also think it's not instructive to focus on the actual winners, instead consider people in top 10, or even top 50.

Note from the sidebar:

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If you'd like to add more, let me know, but otherwise I'm removing this post.

A thousand pardons! I'm new here. Won't make same mistake twice.

All good! Thanks for understanding :)

Much has been written about the underrepresentation of women in STEM and managerial roles. The defence of gender quotas would be that no quota means quota for white men. That the issue isn’t whether women and girls are talented enough, but that they’re simply overlooked. So women don’t get on the short list for promotion because the people who promote someone promote those who are most similar to them, closer to them (usually white and male), that they’re most used to male bosses. With quotas, they have to check their lists more consciously for competence and not what they're used to.

The counterpoint could be that none of these hypotheses explain the underrepresentation of women in STEM, but depending on which are true, they call for dramatically different solutions. If the underrepresentation of women in STEM and managerial roles is entirely attributable to social norms and stereotypes which push young girls away from them at a young age, resulting in the female pool of talent being smaller than the male - then gender quotas and zero-tolerance sexual harassment policies in STEM companies will do absolutely nothing to address the issue (they're not quotas on society after all).

And what of in gender unequal societies? Should nations in West/South/South-East Asia and Africa pursue these quotas until they "achieve equality"? Many women, even engineering graduates, from these countries do not participate for long in the workforce before they marry off. Combined with the severe lack of jobs, female LPR in India is actually decreasing. Would more quotas in education and the workforce reverse this trend, or are we missing the forest for the trees (that is, the lack of formal jobs)?

I think the interesting nuance comes to considering the possibility of both of these things being true:

  1. Social reinforcement is a real effect, significant enough to be worth counteracting, and disproportionately hurts women.

  2. The upper end of the merit distribution naturally skews male, due to biological differences alone.

In such a world, which I have strong reason to believe we occupy, the meritocratic solution would be to enforce male/female quotas that are tuned to counteract 1 without negating 2. In other words, we want to find the correct ratio p of men:women that cancels out the evaporative cooling of women in tech but without lowering the resulting quality of tech workers as a result. (In other words, we want a policy that correctly identifies and counteracts any time a more skilled woman is usurped by a less skilled man because of gender bias in hiring/exposure, but without ever hiring a less skilled woman to replace a more skilled man just to fulfill a ratio)

The combination of my two assumptions leads to a correct ratio that's somewhere in between 0.5 and 1.0. For example, say that 90% of tech workers are currently male, then perhaps a '20% women in tech' quota would be net beneficial for overall merit. I think we would arrive somewhere fruitful if the discussion was about where on this scale that figure lies. But this is a discussion that can't happen, because insinuating p>0.5 is extremely taboo in the blue tribe, while insinuating that quotas could be beneficial at all is taboo in the red tribe.

The idea that “no quota means quota for white men” was probably somewhat true some time in the past. It’s not now, and hasn’t been for at least a couple decades. STEM university programs and major STEM employers have been vocally promoting a commitment to train and hire more women at least since I was in college 20 years ago, and I didn’t get the impression that it was a new thing then.

Throughout my career in engineering so far, the proportion of women in my cohort has remained pretty stable, dating at least back to “number of girls really interested in math and science” in high school (there were perhaps more girls with sufficient aptitude in math and science to be decent engineers - but most of them had other academic talents and interests and parlayed those into careers in medicine or law or whatever). My engineering college was about 30% female (despite actively promoting STEM majors to women and having many programs and scholarships to encourage them) - my major somewhat less, maybe 20%. My company was hiring about 25% women in engineering roles, again despite loud HR diversity declarations, by all indications sincere, promoting hiring women. I’ve been involved in recruiting - we do everything legally permissible (that is, almost everything short of literally hiring based on sex) to hire more women and underrepresented minorities. The numbers have been trending upward over my career, but not particularly fast. My company has a female CEO, but certainly the upper levels of management are male-skewed. But then, those ranks probably reflect the cohort of people who started their careers 25-30 years ago.

From the inside of the pipeline, it sure looks like a pipeline problem. A formative experience of mine was a young woman in my freshman engineering class group project that was in engineering college on a full ride scholarship for women in engineering. She was pretty clearly high IQ, but had zero interest in the nuts and bolts of engineering and basically no special aptitude for the skills unique to engineering. She transferred out to the business school after a year, abandoning her scholarship. Seems to be doing very well now.

Extreme example, but I think indicative of the problem: at the margins, there simply is not a significant pool of talented, interested women who want engineering careers but are driven away by sexism. The marginal female engineer is instead a young woman who was basically bribed into the field by a scholarship, targeted program, or just the promise of a lucrative career. The median female engineer looks a lot like the median male engineer of the same cohort, a math-smart nerd who likes tinkering with things, and these women have been joining the industry for a long time already.

There are almost certainly some pockets of genuine sexism in the industry (likely true of all industries). For the most part I think these are in some of the more toxic start up (or born from start up) cultures, which get massively outsized coverage in media (and even there I suspect the coverage is exaggerated). The large majority of us are employed in big corporations, universities, and government agencies where good corporate HR flacks and middle managers have been fighting over every good female job candidate for decades.

Much has been written about the underrepresentation of women in STEM and managerial roles. The defence of gender quotas would be that no quota means quota for white men. That the issue isn’t whether women and girls are talented enough, but that they’re simply overlooked. So women don’t get on the short list for promotion because the people who promote someone promote those who are most similar to them, closer to them (usually white and male), that they’re most used to male bosses. With quotas, they have to check their lists more consciously for competence and not what they're used to.

I think Dr. Peterson posits that women are too agreeable and that they can be exploited

https://youtube.com/watch?v=5WXo1aFb8MY

Men are probably more inclined to ask for promotions . Under-representation of women in STEM is a separate issue from promotion. I don't think social norms are to blame for under-representation. Who is telling women to not study STEM? It's the opposite. Culture , school, society is obsessed with the idea of having more women in STEM. I think male vs. female aptitude or personality differences may be of better explanatory power.

I think women are substantially less agreeable and less exploitable in at least one important way - they seem less tolerant of toxic “grind” work cultures where 60 hour work weeks are the starting bid and “work life balance” is for pussies, where “passion for your work” and vague promises of probably worthless equity are meant to make up for mediocre base pay.

This makes them less prominent at the sort of companies that make splashy headlines - but I think the women are better off for this.

This is like the argument that affirmative action is good because minorities are often poor and haven't gotten a chance to show their true talent if you look at their school records. If that's why you really want it, you should implement programs that directly help the poor. Doing it this way is obviously insincere.

If we think that 60 hour work weeks are bad, we should require employers not to have 60 hour work weeks, rather than require employers to hire more women on the grounds that women oppose 60 hour work weeks more.

I don’t think I’m arguing what you think I’m arguing.

I don’t believe that raw sexism is at fault for the gender gap, and I am very far from convinced that the gap needs fixing at all. I’m certainly not in favor of mandating either gender quotas OR banning 60 hour work weeks.

Basically, I’m saying that women are less likely to accept shitty working conditions (or more diplomatically, “value promotion/pay at the expense of work balance less”). And I’m not sure they are wrong to do so.

If you haven't read it, Scott's Contra Grant on exaggerated differences is a fascinating an enlightening read.

Short version: it's primarily different interests and options.

I know some people here are concerned with national demographic shifts, but there's a larger and more esoteric question. Epistemic status: Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey.

If we assume that our current state of understanding the physical laws of the universe are mostly correct (especially with the feasibility of FTL space travel), it seems to me that in the medium to long term, Malthusian limits are a foregone conclusion.

At some point the lines of human population, possible food/power/water resources and our technological advancement will intersect. Could be ten billion, could be a hundred billion, could be much more, but without FTL travel, we get there someday. The obvious answer is to have less people, and there's any number of horrific ways to achieve that, and one painless one. Given our assumption, and further assuming that we want to do this the most moral way possible, zero population growth is the way to go. We don't have to kill anyone or stop fighting disease and starvation, we just have to limit everyone to two kids at a global scale. Failing FTL travel, there is a maximum number of humans that are physically, practically, and politically possible to keep alive, and we don't know what those numbers are until we hit them.

Now we're stacking assumptions, which is always a bad idea. If we accept these two basic propositions: No FTL leading to someone someday having to stop people from breeding too much. This brings us to the issue that the demographics of the world change over time, so when this event takes place will have a huge impact on what sort of humans are represented in this hypothetically fixed future population. There will be a lot more africans in ten years than there are now, and fewer europeans, but in a hundred years, or a thousand? Who knows? If the decision is outside the next few decades, it's very hard to say what the population trend lines will be. People tend to slow production as they develop economically, so the whole thing may be solved organically.

This brings us to the questions, if it happens and isn't solved organically: How long do we "hold the door" for more people at the cost of the resources available to each? Does the shifting demographic composition play any role in your decision? Should we aim for maximum diversity? Maximum resources per person? Maximum people?

Bonus question: Do you feel strongly enough about the moral correctness of your current socio-political unit to want the decision? Every day the resources get less and the people more. Someone will make the call at some point. If we defer, someone else makes it. We have our own concerns, but the Chinese have different ones, and the Russians still different ones to that. Or some future superpower nation (or group of nations) not yet in existence. Do we put the decision off as long as possible because people are getting better over time? Or do we act as soon as is possible because we think we're the best possible people to do the moral calculus? And can we trust anyone who thinks that?

No FTL travel, does not imply not getting a vast a mount of resources from space. It doesn't even imply no expansion to other star systems (although obviously it makes such expansion slower and more difficult, and any colonies set up in other star systems will be more isolated and have to be more self-sufficient).

Also even without resources from space, you could have fusion, and other new sources or improved sources of energy.

And in terms of population, projections in to the future can and often have been wrong, but we may be facing more of a problem going forward from declining population (mostly from people choosing not to have children, or to have fewer children, or to put off having children until later and then not having as many child bearing years left), rather than overpopulation for the world. Its possible the world won't hit 10 billion. Its reasonably likely it won't hit 20bil. Such numbers should be quite supportable with technological advances and continued economic growth.

Now we're stacking assumptions, which is always a bad idea. If we accept these two basic propositions: No FTL leading to someone someday having to stop people from breeding too much.

I don't think we do. Family planning exists, and I think people will make calculations on a per-family basis as to how many kids they can support. It won't be easy or super accurate, but people do it regardless even now.

In other words, the problem may very well take care of itself, though not perfectly.

Failing FTL travel, there is a maximum number of humans that are physically, practically, and politically possible to keep alive, and we don't know what those numbers are until we hit them.

There is also the possibility of inorganic life forms, such as beings that exist as computational consciousness and need far fewer resources and space compared to flesh and blood humans. Probably the bigger concern is social programs being run dry and inflation as a result, than the constraints imposed by the physical limits of the universe

The reason I broke those categories out was that I believe the physical, practical and politically possible numbers are all wildly different.

There's a game-theoretical aspect here. Any group can boost its future influence by breeding faster (defection, essentially). Any group that is strong enough can gather more resources for its own population, denying them to others. The political limits will be hit first in this scenario. Look how we howl about five dollar-per-gallon gas, and imagine if we were being put on strict calorie restriction to conserve resources for poorer areas. Hell, if the "poorer areas" were the nearest major city you'd see civil unrest. When the Hutus find out they're getting restricted more than the Tutsis (or vice versa), how is that gonna play out?

Why the focus on FTL? Post-energy scarcity via technological advancement seems possible / more likely than FTL. There are a lot resources available in the solar system, no FTL required.

If the focus by technological advanced societies was on food, healthcare, water and strong borders for themselves rather than feeding the world wouldn't this sort itself through natural consequences? Aren't we already acting via various international aid and development programs? Would stopping these also be acting?

Is there evidence for people getting better over time? Better in what sense?

I want my in-group to decide and act as soon as possible in their own interests.

If correct, this raises the ceiling but does not remove it. FWIW, I don't know if this decision will ever get made, or need to be made. It's an interesting framework for thought experiment though.

I want my in-group to decide and act as soon as possible in their own interests.

This is probably the "correct" or most common real answer. The question then: Is your ingroup big and powerful enough to swing that? And are they (not you) smart enough to know what their interests actually are?

I agree with you, but my answers to the subsequent questions must be negative.

There are a lot resources available in the solar system, no FTL required.

Compared to how many resources we're using now? Sure. With foreseeable technology we might eventually comfortably support quintillions of people in the solar system, maybe sextillions, at a high standard of living. The resource usage of Earth circa 2022 would be negligible by comparison.

Compared to how many resources we could use if we continued to increase population at 1%/year, as we did for most of the last century? Compute 1.01^3000. The solar system would be full, sextillions of spots all taken, in a few millennia. At that point non-FTL interstellar flight doesn't really relieve the pressure; a light cone's volume only grows as a cubic function of time.

Even FTL is a red herring here. FTL to the rest of the galaxy would only buy us a few millennia after the solar system is "full"; to the rest of the universe would buy a few millennia after the Milky Way is full. Packing people into some kind of computronium rather than meat for efficiency's sake might buy a few more millennia still? Got any more ideas? There's only so many millennia of exponential growth that we could buy before we hit limits to growth for the rest of the life of the universe (or we start shortening that life by burning negentropy even faster than it's currently being wasted). Productive new technology is amazing stuff, but it's hard to get more amazing than an arbitrarily large exponent. Fingers crossed for us to find some productive new thermodynamics loopholes too.

Or maybe it's silly to worry about theoretical limits with literally astronomical error bars. Maybe we'll get to post-scarcity anyway, due to population peaking rather than technology keeping up indefinitely with growth, simply because of the demographic transition finally reaching its last stragglers. "Everybody stop having too many kids despite the lack of any serious pressure stopping us" doesn't seem at all like an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy to me, but that hasn't prevented it from becoming amazingly popular so far.

Even FTL is a red herring here. FTL to the rest of the galaxy would only buy us a few millennia after the solar system is "full"; to the rest of the universe would buy a few millennia after the Milky Way is full.

No, you're thinking of the observable universe - that from which light has reached us.

The size of the entire universe is unknown (because we can't see it), but it's presumed to be much larger. Some estimates are large enough that exponential growth is no real issue - particularly the "infinite" and "10^10^10^122" numbers (in the latter case, time is a bigger problem than space).

No, you're thinking of the observable universe - that from which light has reached us.

I was; I appreciate the correction.

There are so many things we still don't understand about the universe; I think it's virtually guaranteed that a black swan fundamentally changes our understanding of technology and how the future will progress.

The available negentropy of the universe still places fundamental limits on the number of humans that can exist. Even with absolute control over all the matter in humanity's lightcone, the accelerating expansion of the universe ensures that we will only ever have access to a finite amount of matter-energy. Even if we run everyone's consciousness is maximally efficient simulations, the total number of subjective-human-experience-years that can exist is not infinite, and eventually the malthusian condition emerges back.

I believe your final question is the best one, and the answer is, "no, we cannot."

The tragedy of politics is that anyone who "wants the ball" in terms of decision-making is almost by definition morally incapable of a good one.

Someone who can wield power responsibly and is willing to do so is not quite a unicorn, though rare enough. As to the problem generally, the Federalist Papers are the best answer I know of, offhand. Decentralize and split power finely, set ambition against ambition, recognize inefficiency as your ally, etc. None of them are the "one weird trick" that solves corruptibility, but there are several partial hacks that keep a lid on things, if maintained.

We don't have to kill anyone or stop fighting disease and starvation, we just have to limit everyone to two kids at a global scale.

What on earth makes you think you can achieve the second clause while still having the first be true?

Do we put the decision off as long as possible because people are getting better over time?

No, because there is no global "we" that is capable of making and enforcing that decision for non-terrible reasons in non-terrible ways.

If we assume that our current state of understanding the physical laws of the universe are mostly correct (especially with the feasibility of FTL space travel), it seems to me that in the medium to long term, Malthusian limits are a foregone conclusion.

The problem with this is that the population most likely to comply with rational limits are the high-IQ types who you would want to reproduce, while low-IQ types are more likely to carelessly continue to reproduce, so you will end up with a population even more heavily titled toward a low-IQ population that is less likely to come up with effective technological solutions to population growth and other potential crises. Instead, we need to encourage high IQ people to reproduce more in the hopes that it will blunt or harness the effects of low-IQ reproduction.

At least in Finland, the fertility rates have for some time been higher among the well-educated than those with a lower level of education. IIRC same applies to other Nordic countries.

I feel like, when you're talking about quadrillions of beings, our existing reasoning breaks down. That is assuming race is still going to be relevant post-singularity, which is at least highly questionable. I think skin color is going to go the way of rare dyes, where rarity used to signal social standing, but now that anyone can trivially have any dye in near any number, it's relegated entirely to aesthetic preference. - What else is there? IQ? Personal choice. Conscientiousness? Personal choice. Neuroticism? Habits? All, all, editable.

In the future, there will be a million times more white-people descendants, a million times more black-people descendants. There will be cross-blending, customization, randomization, de novo species. There will be telepaths, hiveminds, superintelligences, copyclans, and weirder things that we cannot even imagine now. I don't have an answer for you - but I'll eat my hat if the predominant moral question as we approach the physical Malthusian limit will be one of race.

Maybe! I hope so, as the best thing we can say about human progress is that we get to fail at a higher level of problem.

Then again, ingroup bias is strong, especially under threat.

Right, I think more like...

We have this picture. And it has a bunch of colored blobs on it. There's pink blobs, and brown blobs, and yellow blobs, and red blobs. What I'm saying is that we're about to open this picture in MSPaint and go absolutely hog wild on it for a billion years. It's not that ingroup bias isn't strong, it's that I doubt that there will be recognizeable racial ingroups even a century after the Singularity.

That's one possible future. I expect that there will never be a post-scarcity world, as humans are pretty good at creating scarcity. But that could be wrong, and only time can tell.

Are you talking about after we've tiled our light-cone with maximally efficient computronium filled with maximally flourishing post-human sentiences, or are you imagining primates flying through space in little metal spaceships and running out of water on the moons of Jupiter?

Whenever people on Reddit or its progeny (as I now must qualify) lament about the inevitable malthusian limits that physical reality will impose on us, and then attempt to extrapolate back to our current condition, I am always flummoxed by their lack of imagination about the progress of technology even within the laws of physical reality as we understand them. I have no doubt that your concerns will be consigned to the same dustbin of history as Peak Oil theorists, the original malthusians, and foretellers of the Great Horse Manure Crisis.

That's all a distinct possibility, and yet I got the answer I feared. Of all the responses to my query, only one person answered the basic question in a hypothetical scenario, and that very vaguely.

This whole thread is people arguing that the assumptions are wrong, rather than using the assumptions to think about the implications.

Yes, Malthus has been wrong 100% of the time so far. Maybe he'll be wrong forever. But, if someday he isn't, this intellectual performance doesn't make me optimistic about the ability of anyone to solve the issue. People can't even accept the parameters of a thought experiment for the purpose of arguing on the internet.

What relevance to our present circumstances does the eventual malthusian constraint of the mass-energy of our light cone after it has been converted to computronium possibly have? I guess that is the root of my confusion. I agree that "numbers so mind-bogglingly large that it's difficult in practice to distinguish them from infinity" are in fact distinguishable from infinity, but the magnitude is such that I have difficulty understanding how the distinction might have any practical relevance to the minuscule handful of billions of people who exist today, enfleshed and earthbound as we are.

I also think there's a real chance that supercluster-spanning superintelligence may well find a way through the constraint into true infinity. It's hard to estimate odds that there will ultimately be found a loophole in our physical laws, but there seem to be at least a few speculative leads even today, and it would be an act of great hubris to predict the ultimate limitations of a superintelligence whose superiority in intelligence and capability is many orders of magnitude greater above human beings today than we, today, are above ants or amoebas. So the first paragraph is applicable only in the dismal case that no such loophole can be found.

Even without FTL travel, there is enough energy and material being produced in our current solar system to support an unimaginable number of humans. The Dyson sphere gets built incrementally. You just keep building new permanent space habitations ( each could support 50,000 to 1 million people) that get sent into close orbit around the sun, with an array of solar panels running at 100X the efficiency you get running solar panels on earth. Each of the habitations would have enough energy to both make its world a utopian human experience and allow for building new habitations for the colony's children. In the far future, human life will be primarily non-terrestrial, and visitors from the habitations will come on vacation to Earth and marvel at how people put up with blizzards and mosquitos and rain and other hazards of planetary life. What happens when the Dyson sphere is complete and the solar system has reached capacity of quadrillions people? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it...

Also, there is not reason you couldn't send out colonies to other solar systems even without FTL travel. The colony ships would just need to be self-sustaining habitations that would house many generations of people.

Also, there is not reason you couldn't send out colonies to other solar systems even without FTL travel. The colony ships would just need to be self-sustaining habitations that would house many generations of people.

The issue with this is that without FTL there's a limit to what we can reach due to the expansion of the universe, so we're likely stuck in our local group of galaxies, where gravitational attraction holds things together.

Note that the universe doesn't expand at any fixed speed but at a speed per unit of distance, which we normally measure in kilometers per second per megaparsec (one megaparsec is about 3.26 million light years). If the expansion rate is 70 km/s/Mpc, that means, on average, an object that’s 10 Mpc away should expand away at 700 km/s; one that’s 200 Mpc away should recede at 14,000 km/s; and one that’s 5,000 Mpc away should appear to be moving away at 350,000 km/s.

An analogy that's often offered up to illustrate the expansion of the universe would be the balloon analogy, where coins are placed all over a balloon then the balloon is inflated to show that every coin will be moving away from all other coins at a rate proportional to how far away they are (note that you'll be ignoring the interior of the balloon here, this "balloon" universe is represented by the surface). The balloon analogy isn't a perfect one, since the balloon is a 2D universe and is curved whereas our universe obviously isn't 2D and also is flat, but it helps illustrate the concept. What this means is that there's some distant event horizon of sorts beyond which everything will be receding from us at a rate that means we won't ever be able to reach it.

This basically ensures that only a finite portion of the matter and energy that exists in the universe will be available to us, and eventually we'll be reaching some kind of limit assuming no Great Filter scenarios rear their head before then. Improvements in technology can only really take us so far, because eventually there'll be no more increments of efficiency to squeeze out of what we have (it seems reasonable that there will eventually be some sort of sheer physical limit we'll bump up against).

Ultimately, this pushes the problem very far down the line, but doesn't at all eradicate it.

The issue with this is that without FTL there's a limit to what we can reach due to the expansion of the universe, so we're likely stuck in our local group of galaxies, where gravitational attraction holds things together.

Nah, the "reachable universe", while not as large as the "observable universe" and slowly shrinking, is bigger than that (it's something along the lines of a billion galaxies IIRC). The Local Group's only the eventual size of the reachable universe, as t -> infinity, not its current size or anywhere close.

Obviously, exponential growth will still hit the "reachable universe" eventually though.

Of course, if FTL is real then many estimates for the size of the universe boil down to "time and/or aliens are the limit, not space". 10^10^10^122 makes exponential growth go cry in a corner.

Nah, the "reachable universe", while not as large as the "observable universe" and slowly shrinking, is bigger than that (it's something along the lines of a billion galaxies IIRC). The Local Group's only the eventual size of the reachable universe, as t -> infinity, not its current size or anywhere close.

Yes, the reachable universe at the moment isn't only the Local Group. However the size of our reachable universe is premised on the assumption that we leave today, and at the speed of light. What's currently in our reachable universe is a very generous estimate as to what we can practically reach.

In retrospect the way I phrased it was probably misleading - the statement that we might be restricted to the Local Group was my extrapolation of what in practice might be our limit, incorporating my own quite pessimistic estimates as to the difficulty of achieving anything close to relativistic speeds (let alone speeds nearing that of light) as well as the difficulty of keeping a crew alive and the ship working when going at these speeds.

Of course, if FTL is real then many estimates for the size of the universe boil down to "time and/or aliens are the limit, not space". 10^10^10^122 makes exponential growth go cry in a corner.

Given the constraints that relativity imposes, this seems like it might be unlikely absent some revolution in our understanding of physics.

EDIT: added more

my own quite pessimistic estimates as to the difficulty of achieving anything close to relativistic speeds (let alone speeds nearing that of light)

Laser sail/Bussard brake. Antimatter ramjet. (The Bussard idea doesn't work as far as we know, because of the scoop's drag and the difficulties getting p-p fusion to happen in a scramjet throat, but it works as a brake - or injecting antimatter into a scramjet throat would certainly get it to burn.) Baryon number nonconservation does also seem allowed, which implies that non-antimatter-based total conversion engines could be possible. There is, indeed, trouble with keeping a ship intact in the intergalactic void given the cosmic rays, relatively-relativistic dust, and lack of new material to replace that blown off - but that's mostly an issue of building a bigger ship.

Given the constraints that relativity imposes, this seems like it might be unlikely absent some revolution in our understanding of physics.

General relativity does allow for FTL in the broad sense of "get from A to B faster than light conventionally could" - the Alcubierre metric and wormholes being the most obvious. And there are some plausible answers to the time-travel problem (there's a hypothesis that attempting to convert a wormhole into a time machine would collapse it, for instance). Whether FTL's possible is an open question.

General relativity does allow for FTL in the broad sense of "get from A to B faster than light conventionally could" - the Alcubierre metric and wormholes being the most obvious.

Okay now I'm getting into things I'm not too certain on (obviously IANAP), but from what I understand apparent FTL that entails the warping of spacetime is one of these things that we're not 100% sure is impossible but does pose a lot of problems. Apart from the whole "closed timelike curve" problem that these apparent FTL methods seem to create (which, granted, as you noted one can try to resolve through all kinds of difficult-to-verify chronology protection conjectures), there's also the fact that both Alcubierre drives and traversable wormholes alike require unobtainum exotic matter that at best isn't impossible but there's no evidence for its existence and at worst violates an energy condition.

So they're not exactly impossible per se, but there's reasons to believe they probably are.

Clarke's First Law is a decent heuristic, and there's no clear no-go theorem (Earnshaw's theorem is the obvious example of a theorem with a lot of important loopholes). I recall reading about somebody trying to build an Alcubierre metric using the Casimir effect, though I'm not sure how it turned out and that's well beyond my own paygrade.

Overall I'd say it's in the "maybe" category; I'm leery of saying it can be done, but at least as leery of saying the opposite.

Is it not the case that, once we start moving towards those distant objects (in say a colony ship), the expansion behind us compensates for a growing portion of that total expansion? It's my understanding that there IS an inflection point as you describe, but we haven't reached it yet.

Perhaps "Save the Universe" is the ultimate point of the simulation we built ourselves. Seems fitting.

The case for an inflection point is pretty strong. It’s my understanding that for objects that have already crossed the boundary of the event horizon, no reduction of the distance between us and that object will occur.

Think about it this way: There are objects far enough away from you that they are moving away at a rate that exceeds the speed of light, meaning without FTL travel they will be receding from you faster than you can travel to them. The space between you and any object beyond that horizon will only increase and the further they go, the faster they recede. If you try to reach it in a relativistic colony ship, all that happens is that you’ll be stranded from your original galaxy group and will never reach the new one as your galaxy of origin passes out of your event horizon. Sure, you are closer to the object and further away from your point of origin than you would've counterfactually been, but that does not equate to closing the distance.

I find the arguments against moral obligations towards non-existing persons convincing, so I embrace whatever solution is best for the people of today.

Remember Scott's post about how 2100 "isn't a real year"? You're making that mistake, times a thousand. The question of "based on physics, how many consciousnesses can our civilization support" has almost nothing to do with our current existence; any answer, and any pressing need to answer, is way beyond the future event horizon where the world will be unrecognizable to us.

What you're doing now is the equivalent of ancient tribes sitting by their campfire, taking a break from their stories about how the Moon Goddess hides from the Sun God, to talk about how the Fed should optimally set interest rates to avoid a recession. It's beyond pointless.

What you're doing now is the equivalent of ancient tribes sitting by their campfire, taking a break from their stories about how the Moon Goddess hides from the Sun God, to talk about how the Fed should optimally set interest rates to avoid a recession. It's beyond pointless.

To be fair, this is approximately the same criticism I have of the AI panickers -- as though MIRI or its ilk ever had a prayer of solving Friendly AI, and as though delaying "AI capabilities" research would do anything other than give us more time to hang ourselves on some unrelated catastrophe while the hardware overhang grows.

The global total fertility rate was 2.4 in 2019, and has been falling since. The global replacement rate (ie. the number of babies needed to maintain the population as is - if the fertility rate is above that the population is destined to grow, if it's below it's destined to fall) was estimated as 2.3 at the same time, slightly higher than the usual 2.1 rate mentioned in these discussions since it accounts for increased baby mortality in Third World countries. As such, it's very possible that the global TFR is below replacement rate already - which would mean that we are destined to have a global population peak in the coming decades, unless the fertility rates reverse themselves.

Have you read Karlin's Age of Malthusian Industrialism? The argument is essentially that, absent a singularity, there'll be a demographic explosion as culture selects for those who reproduce quickly, with genes doing the same on a deeper level.

I'm familiar with this general argument, but it bears mentioning that this reproductive selection effect is not yet in sight, even though many Western countries have been hovering around or under the replacement rate for decades, if not a good part of a century.

That 2.4 also included a Chinese figure of 1.7 which is far above the true figure of 1.2-1.3 and would lower the global TFR by 0.1. Also worth mentioning that African fertility is terribly measured and could be off by a very large margin, especially recently where mobile internet penetration has increased from essentially zero to a third of the population.

We could very easily be below replacement now with no end in sight.

Do you have a source for that China claim?

China 2020 census

I find the general claims that Chinese population is overcounted by some 200 million (ie. it's 1.2 billion, not the currently stated 1.4 billion) plausible, and suspect that many other countries overcount their populations as well, particularly the African ones where population statistics are basically often more guesstimates than hard numbers and the various regional administrators have an impetus to make higher than lower guesstimates to get more funding from the central government. I wouldn't be surprised if the global population was, perhaps, 500 million lower than currently given, or even more.

It's fairly plausible that we'll solve aging in the next century. Statistically people will still eventually die of other causes, but if you assume an average lifespan 20x what it currently is (ballpark based on accidental death rate, probably conservative since this will likely decline), then holding TFR constant the population will nonetheless be 20x as large.

And probably lifetime TFR will be substantially higher if people have centuries in which to have children. Have a 30 year career, then spend 20 family-focused years raising two kids, then 'retire' for 20 years… then do it all over again! That's a TFR of ~22 if you repeat this over a 1600 year lifespan. And that assumes people don't decide to have larger families given artificial wombs, robot childcare, and lots more material wealth.

This is a possible future, of many. I hope it goes this way.

If fertility rates remain sub-replacement forever, that's an X-risk. I doubt this will actually happen, though.

Whenever I feel existential dread or depression based on the inevitability of increasing entropy putting a cap on the ability of humans, or anyone else, to expand and thrive in the universe, I do find it helpful to read The Last Question by Asimov. Even with our current understanding of physics being accurate, there's the tantalizing possibility that there are further phenomena that we could eventually uncover that gives us a lot more to explore and discover and possibly escape that final fate.

Failing FTL travel, there is a maximum number of humans that are physically, practically, and politically possible to keep alive, and we don't know what those numbers are until we hit them.

That's maybe a bit misleading, since we could likely establish some kind of upper bound which we believe we absolutely CANNOT cross, and then reason backwards from that towards a 'safe zone' of population.

I'm fairly convinced that the upper limit for earth alone, if we assume tech advances continue and we manage to learn to tolerate each other enough to not do a genocide or two (LOL) is around 1 Trillion People.

We are more limited by the rate at which we can grow than the absolute, final number we could maintain.

I also don't know what the hell the demographics would look like since the introduction of genetic engineering, affordable human cloning, artificial wombs, and cybernetics means you can't really reason about what the world looks like beyond these techs since they have fat-tailed impacts. And I'm leaving out AGI because... duh.

I do think that the trope of humanity trending towards becoming a 'single' race which is just a mixture of all the current races due to interbreeding is silly along several dimensions at once.

This brings us to the questions, if it happens and isn't solved organically: How long do we "hold the door" for more people at the cost of the resources available to each? Does the shifting demographic composition play any role in your decision? Should we aim for maximum diversity? Maximum resources per person? Maximum people?

I'm going to punt on this by saying "it'd be nice if we could give people the freedom to make their own choices within the above-discussed framework." That is, once we know the constraints, to make up some arbitrary ones "don't exceed 1 trillion people total, no single person's genetic children should be more than 5% of the total population, don't go under X% rate of genetic diversity, and do not increase the population more than 5 billion in a given year," let people choose when to have kids based on whatever conditions they find themselves in, at whatever time they find appropriate." THE FREE MARKET WILL FIX IT!

Will this mean that the future will be dominated by the hyper-fertile? Almost certainly yes. That's been the case since, I dunno, the genesis of life itself?

But if we're working off of the assumption that we'll never actually get off-world colonization, may as well let people enjoy earth as best they can according to their own utility functions rather than trying to forcibly optimize everything towards some particular metric or metrics and use top-down authority to push us there. Coase theorem tends to imply that given sufficiently low transaction costs/respect for private property rights then we can avoid tragedy of the commons and bargain away externalities, whether those be excess people, too little or too much diversity, or misallocated resources per person.

If we instead assume that we WILL eventually make it out of the planet and out of the solar system, then we're going to have a LOOOOOT of time to think about this problem and maybe solve for it, so this is genuinely a problem for our descendants, and our main goal now should be to NOT DIE so we are able to actually have such descendants.

TL;DR:

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

Somewhere downthread, Kanye West was said to have written some of the best wordplay of the past few decades. Could anyone cite some examples? (ideally text rather than video links)

compared to who, yknow?

set the board, 2000 and newer.

k, wipe off every artist who doesn't rap. i like plenty of pop, Heat Waves is great. lyrically nothing.

off Drake's 2021 Certified Lover Boy the T-1 most viewed Genius track is Fair Trade. Drake's longest verse: https://i.imgur.com/elNr1KT.png

off Kanye's 2021 Donda the most viewed Genius track is Off the Grid. Kanye's longest verse: https://i.imgur.com/bWkIdP0.png

listen to both if you want the best context. reading lyrics alone can miss delivery and the point. Hurricane also off Donda has a couple examples:

Dropped out of school, but I'm that one at Yale

Made the best tracks and still went off the rail

"I'm that one at Yale" can be heard as "I'm the one that yell" connecting by subject with the subsequent line.

Later

Fiendin' for some true love, ask Kim, "What do you love?"

Kanye gives ambiguity in performance, as it can be heard as "ask Him, 'What do you love?'" -- Donda isn't subtle about being a gospel album, but this line is.

but it's not representative to compare Kanye to Drake. it's plenty fair: drake is a worse lyricist, rapper, and producer (and not that i ever really care when it comes to celebrities, a worse person)

representative would be closer with Kanye and Kendrick Lamar.

off Kendrick's 2022 Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers the most viewed Genius track is N95. Kendrick's first verse: https://i.imgur.com/78q6xtA.png

Kanye's is the best of the three by lyricism, performance and production. my method for selection has influenced this, but i think it's better than selecting their most highly viewed tracks on Genius. for Kanye: Mercy, for Drake: God's Plan and for Kendrick: Humble. Kendrick is firmly the best here, but it seems the overall popularity of a song often negatively correlates with its lyrical complexity. see Donald Glover/Childish Gambino. unsurprising of the great polymath-artist of our time, you'd have trouble finding tracks by him that aren't brilliantly written. his most popular is This is America.

Kanye's not as good of a lyricist as Donald Glover, but that's no criticism. Kanye is a better musician, rapper, and producer, and production is where i'll stop.

few artists have a separate wikipedia article for their production discography. Jay-Z isn't the artist he is today (or married to Beyoncé) without Kanye's production on The Blueprint. Artists including John Legend, Common, Kid Cudi, Pusha T, and Travis Scott likewise owe significant success if not their careers to Kanye's work with each. these are careers, on genres? his 2007 Graduation and off it Flashing Lights is the major moment of synth use in hiphop and from it you can draw a straight line to the ubiquity of synth in modern pop. beyond Kanye, only The Neptunes--Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo--have comparable production bona fides. (A little thing I find funny about Pharrell is Happy from Despicable Me isn't even his best song titled Happy. Also this no-right-to-be-a-bop with Trey Parker.)

FiveHourMarathon mentions this below. Kanye's not just the greatest discography of the genre (and MBDTF and Donda are two of the greatest records ever made). his influence can be seen across post-2000 hiphop, and from it all modern pop. in the last 100 years of music, the artists the same can be said of is an extremely short list.

I'm still not sure how you're deciding who had stronger lyricism. Rhyme schemes? Wordplay? Jay-Z is past his prime but latest album blows Kanye out of the water by any technical metric:

Old Brooklyn, not this new shit, shit feel like a spoof

Fat laces in your shoe, I'm talkin' bustin' off the roof

Hold the Uzi vertical, let the thing smoke

Y'all flirtin' with death, I be winkin' through the scope

Hold "the Uzi vertical", a reference to Lil Uzi Vert, one of the new generation of rappers who can't rap by traditional standards and would be laughed at for his look in the days Jay-Z is reminiscing about.

Or from his verse on 'Drug Dealer's Anonymous' a few years back:

I think it's the boys, but I been banking at Deutsche

We got storefronts, we got employee stubs

We been opening studios and 40/40s up

The paper trail is gorgeous

Cases we buries 'em

Before Reasonable Doubt dropped, the jury hung

Bling bling

"Before Reasonable Doubt (Jay-Z's first album) dropped, the jury hung/jewelry hung". As the case was concluding, there was a hung jury/before Jay-Z had money from music he was already rich. The "Bling Bling" is him making it obvious that the wordplay was on purpose. The purposeful ambiguity you praise Kanye for is standard in hip-hop.

And as for rhymes, I'll just post some of Black Thought's verse on 'Crowns for Kings':

Triumph and tragedy, his majesty muscle never atrophied

The devil is a casualty, sucker, you're never catchin' me

Even though you been after me, motherfucker

You gotta bring a army to harm me, I occupy the capacity up

Decapitator of a hater in this modern day

My dossier no less, dealer spray Courvoisier

I'm Jean-Paul Gaultier, Tom Ford, and Cartier

Self-made, I fly vintage from the sommelier

On reserve, flowin' from the blackest fountain

It's all love from public housin' to the Atlas Mountains

I've established the average to always bat a thousand

So after butcherin' this track, it's back to countin'

MBDTF is one of my favorite albums of all time, so hearing you praise Donda in the same breath puts it on my list.

The song is somewhat cliche at this point, but I really like Pinocchio Story from the album 808s and Heartbreak. It's a live recording and Kanye is difficult to hear and understand over the screams of the crowd, but he raps about how he just wants happiness and a normal life, and somehow all the fame and fortune has made everything worse:

Do you think I'd sacrifice real life

For all the fame and flashing lights?

There is no Gucci I can buy

There is no Louis Vuitton to put on

There is no YSL that they could sell

To get my heart out of this hell and my mind out of this jail

There is no clothes that I could buy

That could turn back the time

There is no vacation spot I could fly

That could bring back a piece of real life.

The contrast between Kanye singing about how he wants to experience real life and real love with the screams of the fans proclaiming their love for him is really fascinating and you can hear in the reality of the live performance how all the fans and the fame ... just isn't a substitute for what he's really looking for. It's a wonderful example of how form / function can work together in a piece of music. You don't have to just listen to Kanye explain how the fame isn't getting him happiness -- you can hear the fans screaming "I LOVE YOU KANYE" as he sings about how he can't find real love and how he lost the only real love he'd ever had... I think it's a beautiful song, personally.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OeCdG0Mzrkw

Some of his more memorable rhymes:

Heard they'd do anything for a Klondike

Well, I'd do anything for a blonde dyke

And she'll do anything for the limelight

And we'll do anything when the time's right

Uh, baby you're makin' it (harder, better, faster, stronger)

The last line finishes on a sample of Daft Punk for the punchline.

I dunno if this is one of the best lyrics of our time or whatever, but considering we're playing the field of pop music, at least he didn't rhyme 'baby' with 'baby.'

She got a light-skinned friend look like Michael Jackson

Got a dark-skinned friend look like Michael Jackson

But to be serious, as someone who used to be very into hip-hop Kanye was known for some very funny lines but was never considered a top-tier lyricist by anyone besides Kanye Stans (superfans) because (i) his lyrics were never as complex as say Lupe Fiasco, and (ii) it has long been known that he makes use of ghostwriters, which disqualifies you from the discussion as far as hip-hop fans are concerned.

I'd just note that Kanye's genius was more in the music than the rap, though he was a good rapper. The best argument for Kanye being a genius is that his worst album, 808s and Heartbreak, is the blueprint for Drake's whole career. Drake, the Wkend, and other imitators, is the top seller of the last decade, unfortunately, and he's just a ripoff of Kanye on an off day.

When Kanye came on the scene in the mid 2000s, it was the moment when rap made the transition to the mainstream. It was a totally new feeling on The College Dropout compared to Eminem or Fifty Cent. He pushed all of American pop music in a new direction, multiple times in his career.

808s is considered his worst album? Weird it's my favorite

It's got 3-4 killer tracks but I see why it's his worst.

It's definitely musically his most simple and Pop-py, least challenging album; though tbh I heard that argument before his last few albums that I haven't listened to yet and I've heard by reputation are weird.

I don't know about "best wordplay" but I remember that this came as a bit of a shock when I first heard it on the radio back in 04 or 05. (yes radio, I'm old)

I ain't here to argue about His facial features

Or here to convert atheists into believers

I'm just tryna say the way school need teachers

The way Kathie Lee needs Regis, that's the way I need Jesus

So here go my single, dawg, radio needs this

They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus

That means guns, sex, lies, videotape

But if I talk about God my record won't get played

Well if this take away from my spins

Which'll probably take away from my ends

Then I hope this'll take away from my sins

And bring the day that I'm dreaming about

Next time I'm in the club, everybody'll be screaming out

Jesus Walks

Do radios no longer exist in America? My new car came with one and I've been using it a lot, listening to public stations to see what my not-a-tax-but-you-still-go-to-prison-if-you-don't-pay "broadcasting contributions" are being used for.

What do young people do while driving? Watch youtube?

Audiobooks. Libraries have tons of them, for free, and there are audio courses too if you want your driving time to be educational. If you don't mind paying (or, alternatively, don't mind visiting certain sites of arrrgh persuasion) almost every book can be had in audio form. Not all books work this way - obviously, ones that need lots of illustration aren't a good match - but otherwise you can get many, many hours of content. And then there are podcasts, which can fill another lifetime.

P.S. I'm not a "young people" anymore, but still wanted to note the possibilities.

As a young (well, 30-ish; I was recently called out for the fact that most of my favored "new" music dates from the first half of the 2010s) person who drives a lot, Youtube and Youtube music (formerly Google Music). I pretty much only listen to the radio for college football (and pretty much only watch football on TV).

On that note I must say that I'm impressed with the sub $100 head unit my shitbox car came with. If it had a backup camera (haven't fooled with it to see if that function exists yet) and a slightly better interface than the low-end Pioneer I usually stick with I wouldn't even think of replacing it, and as it is the car phone is better than in the more expensive (but five year old) unit.

They exists but they're definitely an older person/working class sort of thing. The young and the hip aren't getting their music from some local DJ they're getting it off Spotify, Pandora, Apple iTunes, etc...

AM radio is practically dead. FM is dying (iHeartMedia the Clear Channel Communications rebrand has been steadily losing value year after year). Satellite XM requires a subscription. Even "pass the aux cable" is an artifact of an older era when people still had 3.5mm jacks in their personal music devices. Bluetooth connect to a phone playing YouTube music, Spotify or some other audio provider is extremely common.

Virtually no one listens to the radio at home/school if they have internet access. After all, if you can access spotify you have a personalized radio station all day, even if the ads suck at least you can pick the music.

So for a long time now the only reason to listen to the radio was that you didn't have internet access, you lacked the wherewithal to use Spotify. That pretty much left the old, and blue collar workers driving for work or working on a jobsite outside their home location. That's why country, classic rock, and latin stations have pretty much stuck around or expanded, while pop radio is dead and forget Jazz or classical.

Man I remember being nine or ten and being told that Counting Down the Hits with Casey Casum was like, a cultural sacrament. It was something you were just supposed to listen to, to be up on what was big right now. Even if you didn't like the songs, you should be aware of them.

Now I only listen to the local college station. The only station that matters. At least it's weird enough that I find things I wouldn't find otherwise. If you try listening to a surviving pop station, it is dire, even leaving aside the quality of the music, compared to when I was a kid.

College Dropout is still imho Kanye's best work. I always liked these lines:

 I went to the malls and I balled too hard

 "Oh my god, is that a black card?"

 I turned around and replied, "Why yes

 But I prefer the term African American Express"

Black card being a reference to the Centurion Card, AmEx's ultra exclusive no limit card.

Kanye in his prime (haven't listened to his last few albums) had a very fun lyrical delivery with interesting rhyme schemes. example from "Golddigger":

Eighteen years, eighteen years

She got one of your kids, got you for eighteen years

I know somebody payin' child support for one of his kids

His baby mama's car and crib is bigger than his

You will see him on TV any given Sunday

Win the Super Bowl and drive off in a Hyundai

She was supposed to buy your shorty Tyco with your money

She went to the doctor, got lipo with your money

She walkin' around lookin' like Michael with your money

Should've got that insured, Geico for your money (Money)

If you ain't no punk

Holla, "We want prenup! We want prenup!" (Yeah!)

It's somethin' that you need to have

'Cause when she leave yo' ass, she gon' leave with half

Eighteen years, eighteen years

And on the 18th birthday he found out it wasn't his?!

then in the last verse the perspective flips:

Now, I ain't sayin' you a gold digger, you got needs

You don't want a dude to smoke, but he can't buy weed

You go out to eat, he can't pay, y'all can't leave

There's dishes in the back, he gotta roll up his sleeves

But while y'all washin', watch him

He gon' make it to a Benz out of that Datsun

He got that ambition, baby, look at his eyes

This week he moppin' floors, next week it's the fries

So stick by his side

I know there's dudes ballin', and yeah, that's nice

And they gonna keep callin' and tryin', but you stay right, girl

And when you get on, he'll leave yo' ass for a white girl

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

I had never heard of HBD before showing up at the SSC sub in my lurking days, and it was the very poor quality of the opposition there that first clued me in that the advocates must be on to something.

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.

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 don't think race or warrior spirit or anything like that really factors into WWII.

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.

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:

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.

This really undersells how much of the European theatre, for most of the time, was really the Eastern Front.

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.

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.

why are the children of our elites so consistently idiots and drug addicts

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.

I generics wasn’t heritable then we would see far more failed sons then we do now.

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.

I don’t see evidence that it is false

Well two can play at that game, I don't see evidence that it's true.

height that show strong heritable in well fed populations.

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'.

troll accusations

Typically meaningless tactic for dismissing points you don’t like. A lot of whining

why are the children of our elites so consistently idiots and drug addicts

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?

If the HBD-Tards' and Woke-Cels' theories about race were accurate, this ought to have translated into quick and easy victory

I don’t think any HBD advocate claims that by accepting HBD you automatically win all wars regardless of other factors

Typically meaningless tactic for dismissing points you don’t like. A lot of whining

That doesn't necessarily make the accusation false.

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?

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.

I don’t think any HBD advocate claims that by accepting HBD you automatically win all wars regardless of other factors

No they claim that racial purity and homogeneity lead to superior outcomes and then get pissy when you point out historical counter-examples.

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No they claim that racial purity

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?

"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...

The HBD advocates central claim that heritability/genetics trumps 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.

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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The Japanese and German militaries both entered the war with a substantial advantage in technology and training over their opponents.

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.

utterly lacking in warrior spirit/tradition armies of the Aglosphere

The Americans conquered an entire continent, and the British the world. But sure, they were lacking in warrior spirit.

proved far more capable of cooperation, innovation, and stacking enemy dead like corde-wood

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.

IJNS Yamato

The proper appellation is HIJMS Yamato.

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.

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.

Japanese military was delusional, campaigning to conquer a country at least an order of magnitude larger

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

In an attempt to be concise:

  • The Japanese civilian government has had been dominated by the IJA/IJN at that point, especially after the perceived failure of Taisho democracy in the early 1930s. This was not helped with the many assassinations (and many more attempted assassinations) of civilian officeholders by military staff; most notably, of PM Inukai in 1932 in the May 15th Incident. Further background to this: the Meiji restoration was led mainly by the daimyo and samurai military classes, and only were (relatively) discredited by the outcome of the Russo-Japanese war in the 1900s, which saw Japan winning but with the public broadly dissatisfied with its gains; as such, liberal-democratic norms in Japan were relatively superficial. This was exacerbated by (among many, many other things) that the Army and Navy had zero civilian oversight; the chain of command went straight to the Emperor, bypassing any civilian decision-making. The initial invasion of China was essentially a unilateral escalation by the IJA, with the civilian administration in Tokyo reluctantly being dragged along. (Conversely, the Army and Navy were also entirely separate from each other, and often at each others’ throats as well - each side would frequently assassinate officers and civilian supporters of the other side. Naturally, they also had different approaches to the war; the Army wanted to expand north into Siberia, while the Navy wanted to expand south.) In short, Japan’s militarists egged themselves on, no second party necessary.

  • Japan had been at war with China for more than 4 years at the point of the attack at Pearl Harbor; the principle reason for Japan to extend the war to Southeast Asian were to 1) block aid to China, and 2) procure resources for its war on the mainland. (They started by occupying French Indochina, which Vichy France under Nazi control ceded to Japan.) When the US retaliated by embargoing oil, the Japanese war machine (esp. navy) was stuck: they only had a very limited amount of oil left, and had to get it from somewhere (I believe the Manchurian deposits were not known at the time). One of the least bad ways they could think of out of the situation was to try to hamstring American force projection in the region, quickly occupy SEA, then hopefully try to sue for peace with the non-interventionist US; if that didn’t work out, at least it would have bought them time to dig in in the region. As far as desperate plans go it at least made sense for the IJN.

  • The Japanese war command, in its hubris (but also due to not really having suffered defeats at any point, and having already occupied Manchuria), really didn’t expect to be that bogged down in China. They expected the war to be over in a year with Chinese resistance collapsing quickly; instead they were stuck in a long, protracted war where they had trouble extending their control beyond the coast plus some supply lines into the interior.

  • The Japanese also thought that due to irreconcilable regional interests in Southeast Asia, the US, Britain, and Japan would have to come to blows at some point anyway, as Japan expanded its colonial empire.

Edit:formatting

the Japanese had just recently left the iron age less than a century before

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They didn't. Losses on the Allied side were way, way, way higher.

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?

Further, all war since the industrial revolution has been trending against the concept of numerical superiority.

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.

The Russians had essentially limitless cannon fodder

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.

India has no shortage of high-IQ individuals

For country of 1.5 billion, they do have a shortage.

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).

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.

that's both unkind and untrue.

...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.

For country of 1.5 billion, they do have a shortage.

Is the per-capita number what's important, or the absolute numbers?

why are the children of our elites so consistently idiots and drug addicts

Do have evidence that they're disproportionately idiots and drug addicts? I strongly expect the opposite.

If the HBD-Tards' and Woke-Cels' theories about race were accurate, this ought to have translated into quick and easy victory

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

This might be a language barrier issue but that is not what you wrote. An equality is not an implication

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.

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

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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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.

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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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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.

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

There was consistent evidence to support an association between lower childhood SES and later drug use, primarily cannabis use. However, few studies examined cannabis dependence, and studies of more problematic forms of drug use gave contradictory results

A 2010 study found

Higher parental education is associated with higher rates of binge drinking, marijuana and cocaine use in early adulthood. Higher parental income is associated with higher rates of binge drinking and marijuana use. No statistically significant results are found for crystal methamphetamine or other drug use. Results are not sensitive to the inclusion of college attendance by young adulthood as a sensitivity analysis.

A 2012 study found

Smoking in young adulthood was associated with lower childhood family SES, although the association was explained by demographic and social role covariates. Alcohol use and marijuana use in young adulthood were associated with higher childhood family SES, even after controlling for covariates.

Another 2012 study found

Except for alcohol abuse, substance use rates were systematically higher in individuals with low, rather than intermediate/high, socioeconomic position (age and sex-adjusted ORs from 1.75 for cannabis use to 2.11 for tobacco smoking and 2.44 for problematic cannabis use)

At least make your argument internally consistent. Hitler considered the Anglos to be cousins from a common Germanic stock, i.e.:

Friendly relations continued between the two countries the next year with former prime minister David Lloyd George visiting the Fuhrer at his Bavarian retreat in September 1936. Lloyd George was very impressed with the very pro-English Hitler. He claimed that, “Germany does not want war and she is afraid of an attack by Russia”, something that many British politicians were also concerned about. He practically apologised for the First World War and said, “There is a profound desire that the tragic circumstances of 1914 should never be repeated”.

This was music to Hitler’s ears. More than anything else he dreamed of an alliance with Saxon England. A nation, he believed, that was made up of and run by people of “excellent Germanic stock”. He was not too sure about the Celtic races that made up the rest of Britain though, and always referred to the UK as “England”. Hitler proclaimed that, “the English nation will have to be considered the most valuable ally in the world”. He added, “England was a natural ally for Germany and an enemy of France”, plus the latter’s communist friends in Russia, no doubt. Relations became even more cordial with the Fuhrer, referring to ‘Mein Kampf’ and other publications of his, when he asserted that the English are, “our brothers, why fight our brothers?”.

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.

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 *

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.

You shouldn't be thinking of internet accounts as people. You should be looking at them as disposable personas.

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?"

and that contrary to rationalist norms where in assumptions of trust and good faith are the default

Well, see, I don't actually consider myself a rationalist, and I don't assume trust and good faith from new posters.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't assume trust and good faith from new posters.

Then you're in the minority and are truly my spiritual successor. ;-)

I wish you wouldn't keep assuming we're stupid.

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.

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.

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.

if things like intelligence and personal discipline are primarily genetic why are the children of our elites so consistently idiots and drug addicts

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.

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.

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:

Then you hear the next prayer. This goes: "We were wrong about the Russians." This song is usually sung by men from some eastern province, who were over there in their youth, some of whom have written very good books and had a Russian mother, too, and now they tell stories. It is also sung by the little political vagabonds whom we first came to know in the eastern struggle against Poland, whom we rejected at home, and who have now been drafted as soldiers, officers and majors, and are still peddling their intellectual poison under cover of the uniform of our decent German army. Goaded on by this propaganda tendency -- I can't call it anything else -- they tell you so many stories, or write them home by military post (and the stories then trickle down from top to bottom): "Yes, we were wrong about the Russians. The Russians are not at all the robots" (this is the expression used most frequently) "that we thought they were in 1941. Now that we're over here in the East, our eyes have been opened. The Russians are a noble people”, and so on and so forth, “a collection of all virtues. We just have to educate them as National Socialists, the best thing would be to create a NSRAP or something similar. Then they would" -- this is the next bit -- "form the army of liberation under General Vlasov".

You're straight up wrong. Like the Nazis were.

If the HBD-Tards' and Woke-Cels' theories about race were accurate

Instead the racially diverse, hopelessly disorganized (IE decentralized), and utterly lacking in warrior spirit/tradition armies of the Aglosphere

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.

First, citation needed (no, other than Hunter).

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.

Lmao no they didn't

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.

Here's Himmler whining about it.

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.

Wokes predict that diversity breeds success, they have pseudo-mathematical papers on that.

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.

How's that diversity and disorganization working out for Russian Federation right now?

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.

A Borderer descendant talking about the lack of warrior tradition, that's rich.

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.

edit: fixed image link

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.

Should be fixed now.

I'm afraid Hlynka still doesn't understand regression to mean

If you're of what might be referred to as the "pro-HBD" persuasion around here, how would the world look different if there were not meaningful cognitive/behavioral differences between ethnic groups?

You mean if those differences weren't even partially explained by genetics, right?

Well, we'd need heavy handed intervention in underperforming communities to bring them up to scratch, I suppose. The civilising hand of the Asian man, most likely. Obviously some people are just better/worse at forming communities and those that are worse should learn from those who are better.

If you're of what might be referred to as the "pro-HBD" persuasion around here, how would the world look different if there were not meaningful cognitive/behavioral differences between ethnic groups?

This would be a world very different than our own. But efforts to completely eradicate the culture of failing communities would be one obvious direction.

If HBD were true, there would be no Flynn Effect - there's no way the genes of the Western nations have changed that much so quickly.

I would even say that the changes in which societies are hovels and which are not, such as the shift in the center of civilization from the Muslim world to Europe over the past several centuries, are too fast to explain with HBD.

I'm too lazy to look up the actual numbers, but if I remember correctly, if we accept that the IQ numbers for Africa are the result of a culturally-unbiased assessment of intelligence, then Africa would be a society of actually literally retarded people, which it is not.

Certain genetic changes can occur quickly, suppose you have many inbred groups, and due to something (easier transportation, cultural bans on incest) it can change in 1 generation. Some countries are still noticeably inbred.

To add to others said, reduced pathogen load compared to 100 years ago (due to vaccines and hygiene) also probably improved IQs too.

if we accept that the IQ numbers for Africa are the result of a culturally-unbiased assessment of intelligence

The most common estimate held in HBD is that black Africans IQ would improve by 10-15 points if living standards improved to that 1st world has.

a society of actually literally retarded people, which it is not.

In what sense?

They live lives, make social bonds, love, children, you don't need high intelligence for that.

there would be no Flynn Effect

This is way bigger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem

HBD people often claim that the flynn effect happened and was very strong, and indeed at least half if not more of the africa / US IQ difference today are environmental - but things like the internet, mass education, libraries, and cheap goods and modern life generally smooths out environmental differences like access to education and supplementation and industrial food and malaria, so the remaining differences in the US are mostly genetic. Like, if there's a lot of environmental and genetic variation, and then we get rally good at dealing with the environmental variation ...

However many of them also claim Africa is a society of actually retarded and functionally disabled people who are 70IQ, and, yeah, it isn't. But HBD people being puerile, bigoted racists doesn't make HBD false, lots of correct things were historically believed by disgusting bigots first.

If HBD were true, there would be no Flynn Effect - there's no way the genes of the Western nations have changed that much so quickly.

Do you feel changes in diet couldn't explain much of the difference? To pick just one example, we know iodine deficiency during pregnancy results in adult IQ for the child almost a standard deviation lower than pregnancy without iodine deficiency.

I find it easy to tell a story where elites have always tended to have access to varied and nutritious food, and thus be close to their maximum genetic potential, while peasants would frequently have vitamin deficiencies and have their height and IQ stunted. Then industrialization and the scientific revolution happen, humans figure out most of the food problem and figure out how to address the most important vitamin deficiencies in the population, and you see the Flynn Effect for several generations, which eventually tops out at the point where people's natural genetic potential lies.

If this explanation is true, it would be very easy to try to hypothesize something like: black people tend to not absorb certain vitamins as well as white people, so many of them might have deficiencies that go unnoticed that lead to lower IQ. I tend to recall looking at data for iodine levels in black mothers in the modern US, and they have the lowest levels of any ethnic group - though still above what is considered adequate for the IQ effects. It doesn't require that many epicycles to propose the hypothesis that what is adequate iodine for other groups might not be adequte iodine for black mothers - or that the scientists got the initial number wrong, and more iodine is needed to make up for the deficit.

And even without such speculation, it would be very simple to speculate about vitamin deficiencies in general in the US black population. This would allow for a "cultural" explanation for low black IQ that has a "biological" solution (force black people to eat different food/offer some product that has bioavailable versions of the missing vitamins.)

I find it easy to tell a story where elites have always tended to have access to varied and nutritious food

even if this was true, random drift would sort things. But give 'joe the plumber' person a lot of iodine and he's not gonna become einstein. There certainly were a lot of people in the past who were very smart but, by chance, were peasants. But that doesn't mean the elite weren't very sorted for genetics of various sorts!

The explanation might not be iodine. Black people have high rates of vitamin D deficiency, for example.

if we accept that the IQ numbers for Africa are the result of a culturally-unbiased assessment of intelligence, then Africa would be a society of actually literally retarded people, which it is not.

This is such an annoying and ignorant argument. Clinical retardation is not just the condition of having low IQ.

HBD is not the claim that environment has no effect on IQ. A 50% environment, 50% genetics model to explain IQ variation is a pro HBD position

No it isn't. HBD as typically sold by its advocates requires genetics to be the dominant factor.

If you read a review article on behavioral genetics, i'd recommend this, iirc one of the things it initially emphasizes is that heritability is entirely a contextual thing. The heritability of a trait just tries to measure the extent that it, in a specific population under the myriad conditions and complex causation within it, a trait is caused by genes, in the sense that individuals with shared genes are, ceteris paribus, all else equal, more likely to share the trait. But this could entirely depend on environment - 'arm count' is much less heritable in an environment where people get their arms cut off at random and .1% of the population has a gene that sometimes causes arm malformation, vs an environment where nobodys arms get cut off and 50% of the population has a gene that reliably causes arms to not develop in utero. Despite the genes involved being the same!

Similarly, the HBD argument is - in the past, environment was dominant, and IQ had a much lower "heritability" if one could measure it - malaria? mauled by tiger? intestinal parasites? bad weather causes crops to fail? All random factors lowering IQ. Sure, a smarter person can avoid those a bit better, but not enough. But now modern society is very good at eliminating all of those - industrial food production, modern medicine, society, hygiene, education, travel, internet - and most of the variation left is genetic. HBD generally claims that within america, genetics is dominant - but not for instance between africa and america, or historical america and america.

In The Bell Curve, which I think can safely be called one of the seminal works in HBD discourse, Charles Murray states that evidence shows intelligence is between 40-80% heritable, and he puts his personal estimation in the middle at 60%. HBD as usually presented does not require that heritability be the dominant factor in determining intelligence, just a major component. If it's 40% heritable, that still has significant explanatory power.

That's the motte the bailey is when the same poster comes back 20 minutes later askings stupid questions like; If HBD is false what were Africa and Latin America were doing while the whites and Asians were duking it out for world supremacy?

You're the one who is engaging in strategic equivocation here, and being a veteran of the old atheism wars myself I see little to be gained by getting drawn into a Gish gallop with you.

That's a good point I hadn't thought and I take back the first paragraph I wrote.

I believe racial groups have different mean IQs and that some of these differences could be partially explained by genetics. I guess that puts me in the HBD camp.

If HBD weren't real, I don't think I'd expect any major differences between countries. Asia and Africa would still be held back by poor institutions. The fact that the middle-IQ group dominated both the lower and higher IQ groups leads me to believe group IQ differences didn't have a high first-order impact on history. I think the biggest differences would be within countries. I'd expect to see more black and fewer jewish scientists, engineers, CEOs, etc. Racism would still exist on a similar scale. We'd worry less about economic disparities, but still worry about representational disparities. American "guilt" towards blacks would more closely resemble european guilt towards jews.

There's another aspect of HBD which proposes that, although men and women have the same mean IQs, men have higher variance than women. Whether that's true or not, I think the counterfactual would be of higher consequence.

Ignoring IQ, HBD suggests that the structure of the human mind is structured to adapt to a particular culture and environment, a la Joseph Heinrich’s WEIRD research. If evolution doesn’t work above the neck, culture has to do everything. This theoretical Homo Universalis doesn’t have instincts towards face reading or language, and has to cludge stuff together using very fragile chains of heritage. They probably don’t crack large social organization and remain as small tribes of mutually unintelligible hunter-gatherers.

An alternative frame would be that people have ‘souls’. At a certain level of cognitive capacity beings tap into some implicit structure in the universe that allows for all the things people do, like some more ornate version of math or game theory. Any particular instance might have local variation but is basically the same as every other instance in structure if not in content. Now that I spell this out, this sounds pretty similar to bog-standard Christian philosophy.

From the pro-HBD side: Please clarify where you want the historical starting point for this uniformity. If it's far enough back, I'd expect that such differences would gradually evolve.

In the world as it is now, you have situations like "kids with fetal alcohol syndrome are more likely to grow up to abuse alcohol, and thus to abuse alcohol during pregnancy, and thus to have kids with FAS". Even if susceptibility to alcoholism has no genetic causes, we would still expect it to have nonzero heritability.

A world that resembles our own in which HBD is entirely false could look like one where there were many behaviors that were passed down in that way. We would expect to see substantial differences in outcomes within different subcultures of the same group in such a world, but I don't have a rigorous idea of how much more than one where the heritability of outcome-correlated stuff is due to genetics vs behavior.

Even if susceptibility to alcoholism has no genetic causes, we would still expect it to have nonzero heritability.

Pretty sure that's zero heritibility, using the technical definition.

Indeed, Falconer's formula would give an estimate of 0 for heritability in the above situation.

So I suppose the concrete answer to "what does the world in which genetics don't play a significant role in determining outcomes look like" is

  1. The children of alcohol abusers are more likely to abuse alcohol themselves

  2. This remains true even if the children are adopted at birth.

  3. The correlation in the rate of alcohol abuse is the same between identical and fraternal twins.

3 is something that it should at least in principle be possible to check in our world. At the very least I would be surprised if nobody has done it for height and BMI.

That is quite a clever metric, thanks for pointing it out.

I’m mildly pro HBD in that I think it’s real but is overstated in terms of explanatory power.

So, what would I expect to be different if HBD weren’t true at all? I would expect South Africa to be far more functional and probably wealthier, and Uruguay and Costa Rica to be less so.

If HBD explanatory power was understated, on the other hand, I would expect to see a wealthier North Korea and China, and probably a somewhat less developed Spain and Argentina.

I don't think "more" or "less" propositions like that really answer this question.

If you believe there is no such thing as lucky people

A world with where some people are luckier than others would be like this world but with more wealth disparity

If you believe

If you believe there is no such thing as luck

A world with where some people are luckier than others would be like this world but with less wealth disparity

This tells you nothing about what predictions these models are making that are coming (or failing to come) true.

I'm mostly agnostic on HBD (though I lean pro) precisely because I don't believe the world would look all that differently if it went one way or another. My is that the majority of issues in poor minority groups are caused by culture: a lack of respect for education, marriage, rule of law, and unselfish cooperation with each other, and that these cultural elements are self-perpetuating and economically crippling. While innate intelligence does play some role in influencing whether a person will abandon or change these cultural elements, it's a minor role. People with a genetic predisposition for high IQ but a bad culture frequently end up in bad outcomes because they fail to learn or care about learning and never rise to their true potential. Similarly, low IQ people with a good culture often become productive workers and good people and beneficial to their community because they work hard and care about people. IQ plays some role, but culture plays a much larger role.

Society is filled with selfish intelligent people and kind unintelligent people of all races. But they tend to come in clusters, as culture perpetuates these traits separately from genetics (though still tending to run in families), so you see disproportionate amounts of selfishness and other negative cultural traits among certain races. Heritabile =/= Genetic, and the distinction is important because culture can change, while genes can't.

a lack of respect for education

I don't think jews have any more respect for education, marriage, rule of law, or unselfish cooperation (in fact, the stereotype, although not that accurate, is that they're selfish), yet they are nobel prize winners or accomplished mathematicians at 10x the rate of whites or asians.

Really? Because the stereotypes I'm familiar with involve Jewish mothers hounding their kids to excel and overachieve and never being satisfied with mediocre or average results (maybe I'm mixing this one up with Asian stereotypes, but I think it's true here to a lesser extent). Also, intellectual arguments and thought experiments about Jewish law, and respect for cleverness. And rather than being purely selfish, the stereotype I usually hear is that Jews are selfish in dealings with gentiles, but friendly with other Jews, preferentially hiring each other due to a sense of shared culture and nepotism. Which is probably even more beneficial for a subculture with enough power than general unselfishness would be. I don't know how truthful these stereotypes are, but to the extent they are true I would predict that they would lead to above average success.

I probably should've said elite whites and asians.

Jewish mothers hounding their kids to excel and overachieve

Is this more true for jews than asians, though? Because jews are much more overrepresented than asians in nobel prizes in comparison to global population.

Also, intellectual arguments and thought experiments about Jewish law, and respect for cleverness.

Second-generation atheist jews are still very intelligent, despite no jewish law. "Respect for cleverness" seems wishywashy.

the stereotype I usually hear is that Jews are selfish in dealings with gentiles, but friendly with other Jews

Friendlier, yeah, but not unselfish, the 'stereotypical jew' still screws over other stereotypical jews.

Like, none of what you claimed makes any sense in explaining '30% of technical nobel prizes despite 2% of us population / .2% of global population'.

You always have to be careful about controlling for confounders, but there's enough evidence in the same direction that I generally buy it. HBD is probably true, but my argument is that its effect is significantly smaller than the effect from culture, so it's not an important priority for addressing or using to explain gaps. It's not as simple as reasoning "Median househould income is $77k for white people and $46k for black people, but white people are smarter so everything is fine". If HBD is false then with equal cultures, and absent racism, the median income for black people would also be $77k. If HBD is true, then with equal cultures the median income with equal cultures might be $72k or something, something between $46k and $77k and closer to the latter than the former. The gap is caused by multiple factors, and there is significant progress that can be made, and most but not all of the gap could theoretically be closed. If HBD is true, then it will eventually be important to acknowledge as true so that someday if we reach the equilibrium we don't keep endlessly looking for racists and/or cultural issues, because the gap can't ever be closed completely. But at the moment there's so much other stuff going on that it's only a small piece of the pie.

If HBD is true, then with equal cultures the median income with equal cultures might be $72k or something, something between $46k and $77k and closer to the latter than the former.

It could be lower than $46k, if black culture was (before equalization) better than white culture, so equalizing.

But the big "advantage" of the cultural explanation is it's difficult enough to disentangle it from genetics that it allows HBD to be unfalsifiably denied.

But the big "advantage" of the cultural explanation is it's difficult enough to disentangle it from genetics that it allows HBD to be unfalsifiably denied.

While it's true that disentangling cultural factors is difficult when trying to explain the overall success of a group, it's a very big mistake to take this as active evidence against culture's importance. I'd also put myself into the "mostly cultural, somewhat genetic" camp. To me, none of the current evidence can plausibly refute the existence possibility (edit) of a society with a common culture in which no genetic group is far more or less successful than the others, with the genetic factors only showing up as numerical discrepancies.

In other words, under this model, even if pure HBD explains some differences in group outcomes, it does not explain the vast differences in poverty, criminality, etc., seen in our current society. Explanations based on cultural coincidence have plenty of well-known justifications for these, such as past prejudice resulting in persistent negative outcomes, or groups facing hardship becoming more successful through cultural selection. Why shouldn't the pro-HBD crowd have to similarly justify its position that higher a higher-IQ population (either on average or on the upper tail) will almost invariably result in a far more successful culture?

To me, none of the current evidence can plausibly refute the existence of a society with a common culture in which no genetic group is far more or less successful than the others, with the genetic factors only showing up as numerical discrepancies.

There's no need to "refute" the existence of such a society, because it does not exist, by observation.

In other words, under this model, even if pure HBD explains some differences in group outcomes, it does not explain the vast differences in poverty, criminality, etc., seen in our current society.

This model seems to be multiplying entities unnecessarily.

Explanations based on cultural coincidence have plenty of well-known justifications for these, such as past prejudice resulting in persistent negative outcomes, or groups facing hardship becoming more successful through cultural selection.

Not only do the two well-known justifications you just mentioned argue against each other, they also fail to conform with the observable outcomes. We know that some groups have bad outcomes whether being actively discriminated against or "helped". We know that other groups have bad outcomes when actively discriminated against and do much better when they no longer are.

There's no need to "refute" the existence of such a society, because it does not exist, by observation.

My apologies, I misworded that. I meant to express the possibility of such a society.

This model seems to be multiplying entities unnecessarily.

Occam's razor is a principle: it is not a universal law, especially in the social sciences with their confounders upon confounders. The simplest possible strawman HBD model of "higher IQ invariably implies greater relative success" can be easily refuted by the various pre-industrial empires that rose and fell from environmental factors, such as ancient Egypt, which could repeatedly reform around the Nile valley even when the government collapsed, or dynastic China, which couldn't survive contact with the industrialized West, or the Central and South American empires, which couldn't prove themselves one way or another before getting decimated by smallpox.

I'll admit that there haven't been so many clear counterexamples to the "naive HBD" model following the Industrial Revolution in Europe, although it would predict that China and/or Japan will ultimately prevail over the West. The cultural model would attribute the Industrial Revolution to the combination of an environment demanding industrial solutions and a society stable enough to develop them, where the societal stability came from historical and cultural happenstance rather than being predetermined by HBD factors.

Not only do the two well-known justifications you just mentioned argue against each other, they also fail to conform with the observable outcomes. We know that some groups have bad outcomes whether being actively discriminated against or "helped". We know that other groups have bad outcomes when actively discriminated against and do much better when they no longer are.

The two justifications can be aligned pretty easily with a basic path-dependence model: when one cultural group is threatened by another, it either fails to defend itself and becomes persistently unsuccessful, or defends itself becomes persistently successful, and this initial failure or success can be attributed to temporary environmental, military, or political conditions. Under this model, even if an unsuccessful group receives political or economic "help", it cannot become inherently successful unless its culture changes. (Thus leading to the old debate over whether and how culture can be intentionally changed.)

Occam's razor is a principle: it is not a universal law, especially in the social sciences with their confounders upon confounders.

It's not. Nevertheless, when you're willing to give yourself as many entities as you need to save your theory, you add nothing to the world's store of knowledge.

The two justifications can be aligned pretty easily with a basic path-dependence model: when one cultural group is threatened by another, it either fails to defend itself and becomes persistently unsuccessful, or defends itself becomes persistently successful, and this initial failure or success can be attributed to temporary environmental, military, or political conditions. Under this model, even if an unsuccessful group receives political or economic "help", it cannot become inherently successful unless its culture changes. (Thus leading to the old debate over whether and how culture can be intentionally changed.)

Yes, you can make this model. Can you, in principle, back it or refute it with evidence? If not, the model is vacuous. If you can.... well, does it fit with the evidence? I think it does not.

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But the big "advantage" of the cultural explanation is it's difficult enough to disentangle it from genetics that it allows HBD to be unfalsifiably denied.

That sword cuts both ways you know. I don't think it's any coincidence that the HBD and CRT appear to be two sides of the same coin, progressives, be they blue-pilled or red-pilled, will ties themselves in knots to avoid conceding that culture actually matters.

I think it's a lot duller on one side. Progressives who deny HBD are also adamantly against doing anything about black culture, and they'll deny culture as a factor except occasionally as a last-gasp defense against HBD. HBDers, on the other hand, have evidence that it isn't shared environment (which would include culture), though that evidence may not be as strong as they like.

I think HBD is true and relevant. If you want to blame culture, though, be my guest, as long as the suggested interventions are along the lines of "change the bad culture or remove people from it" and not "blame whitey for the bad culture and force him to prop it up".

Even though the modern progressive "blame Whiteness" position is full of holes, there's still plenty of room open for "cultural improvement" positions (which I am somewhat partial to myself), before going for the full HBD explanation. In the American context, positions in that direction have been espoused by both the black conservatives and the classical Marxists. Naturally, the big difference is in their prescriptions: the former call for the black population to adopt diligence and responsibility to lift itself up, while the latter consider the original prejudice, the current top-down progressive overtures, and the calls for "rugged individualism" to all be tricks to distract the oppressed from rising up against their real oppressors (i.e., the stupidpol position, although I've heard similar things independently from a vocal Marxist friend).

If you're of what might be referred to as the "pro-HBD" persuasion around here, how would the world look different if there were not meaningful cognitive/behavioral differences between ethnic groups?

We would not exist. God would be real. Cartesianism would be accurate. At the most basic level, it is extremely difficult to put "HBD is fake" and "evolution and scientific materialism is real" into the same boxes of reality.

If HBD was an explanation for the distribution of wealth and power, for one thing, I would expect people with wealth and positions of power to be significantly smarter than they are.

But they are quite smart? Musk, bezos, gates, ellison, zuck are all quite smart. People who have power in politics are also often smart - random example, Thomas massie, who I'd only known as 'republican who posts very dumb things on twitter' (universal in both parties ofc), apparently "also ran a start-up company based in Massachusetts, where he previously studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).. They may be dumb liberals or dumb conservatives, but plenty of extremely smart people can have dumb political beliefs, and smart people are also capable of running 'dysfunctional institutions'.

For every Zuck there's a whole lot of Biden, Trump, etc. The number of highly influential inventor types is very low compared to, say, total Ivy League Graduates who I would estimate are, on average, 1000x more personally powerful than the average competent technologist.

how would the world look different if there were not meaningful cognitive/behavioral differences between ethnic groups?

I would assume that genetics are playing a much smaller role in human physiology in general. So if the differences in cognition were nonexistent or weren't due to pure genes/biology, then we would have to assume most other human traits were not due to them either.

So I would expect to see:

The winners of most events centered around running would be a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, rather than, say, Marathon winners being almost exclusively from Kenya

I'd expect that height would be evenly distributed amongst ethnicities, rather than being dominated by the Dutch. Along with this, I'd expect much greater Asian representation in the NBA and NFL. Pygmy peoples, likewise, would be an even greater anomaly than they are now.

We'd also want to figure out what was in the water in Hungary that it produced so many ridiculous geniuses born around the turn of the 19th century, if there isn't a large genetic component. Alternatively, we'd expect to see groundbreaking physicists and mathematicians produced at similar rates by all countries, and not so heavily representing Asheknazis.

Basically, we'd expect that differences in culture, diet, and SES might explain 100% of any observed differences in any particular trait, and that interventions in culture, diet, and SES would lead to rapid changes (not necessarily improvements) in those traits without seeing major changes in their genetic code.

Rather than taking hundreds of generations to produce helpful adaptations.

If there is no Human Biodiverisity, then there must only be Human Sociodiversity or Human Cultural Diversity, and in that sort of world it should be much easier to manipulate human traits/outcomes at the national population level.

Basically, we'd expect that differences in culture, diet, and SES might explain 100% of any observed differences in any particular trait

I don't think we would expect that. If there are other factors, including randomness, which contribute at all, the sum of the effect of the known sources of variance will be less than the observed variance.

From whence comes the randomness, though?

In genetics, we know how mutations can arise and accumulate over time. Radiation, toxins, and transcription errors during cellular replication are often random themselves, and thus the genes that survive won't be completely random, but at least we can see where the randomness arises from.

If genetics aren't determining outcomes, then we must be talking about inputs of randomness from the environment, instead, and that is comparatively simple to control and reduce.

Randomness in biological development? Even as things are, with HBD, there's a lot of effects that look like randomness in non-additive genetic variation.

Yes, environmental stuff would be the rest. Controlling for environmental stuff is actually very very hard - that's why for science where we actually try to be correct instead of trying to appear to try to be correct (e.g. medicine), the gold standard is randomized controlled trials rather than observational studies.

That's not to say it's always impossible to get useful information from observational data. For example, there's clever stuff like this. Still, if you take the social science approach of "lol just control for a couple things, if it's good enough to get published it's definitely correct" your results will not be very robust.

But what sources of randomness in local environment would trigger differences in long-term outcomes in the absence of genetic influence?

Not who you're arguing with but the first example that comes to mind is the influence of the uterine environment. There's a plausible argument that the uterine environment has an impact on a lot of different areas in life (birth order effects, FAS, etc) and there's a whole galaxy of potential interactions there.

There we go.

Would this cause us to see significant differences between population groups?

It would, but those differences would not be the ones we see in the world we live in and they would respond differently to testing.

Getting in a car crash, winning the lottery, making friends with the right people... all the stuff we call "luck".

That sounds like it explains individual outcomes, and can be mitigated through social policy.

Group outcomes are made of individual outcomes. Particularly in cases like "making friends with the right people", those individual outcomes may be correlated.

Not that "early luck compounded into long-term differences" can't be mitigated through social policy, but doing so transparently and fairly and in a principled manner is hard for the same reason that "controlling for" stuff in studies is hard.

I have been convinced of the truth of HBD mostly by 1) first-hand exposure to stereotype accuracy, i.e. life experience 2) reading scientific papers 3) appreciating the sheer intellectual vacuity of blank slatist rhetoric. That isn't, truth be told, knockdown evidence to any but a very scrupulous observer with a good eye for inconsistency. In principle, human societies are dysfunctional enough that we could be missing trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk, neglecting low-hanging fruits of environmental interventions that semi-randomly and without notable spikes in investment produce outstanding talent; the world could, in broad strokes, look very similarly to how it looks and yet not work according to theories of hereditarians. (Ironically, the near-universal institutional HBD denial despite widespread, traditional conviction that children inherit traits of their parents is evidence enough of our societies being too dumb and diseased to figure out good policies).

Still, if we do not assume a hopeless scenario of that sort, I'd have expected:

  • Very efficient interventions that are surprisingly simple, like drinking deionized water or never calling your child a dumb little shit once. Probably only practiced in closed elite environments (and kept secret/discouraged for plebs).

  • Following from that, stronger and increasing correlation of class and intelligence, as well-off people (who are already motivated to force their children into grueling training, IME) figure out the best regimens to get their dynasty an edge over competitors. After all, my main reasons to not be a hereditarian had been anecdotes about early life training leading to eminence in adulthood (Polgar! Sidis! Wiener! Mill! Mozart!) – surely with modern data and scientific methodology something better could be found.

  • Far different distributions of traits: lack of positive manifold, strong culture-bound (and ethnicity-blind) talent density, and more «comic book» style individuals with specific hyperdeveloped abilities.

All in all it'd be a pretty optimistic world – one where we're close to figuring a somewhat cheap method of universal cognitive and physical enhancement. It's a wooey world of the psychedelic revolution. I'd not be against living there.

Very efficient interventions that are surprisingly simple, like drinking deionized water

Why? As far as I know that's only going to destroy your teeth.

Duh, that's what the elites want you to think!

I was a birdbrain and didn’t actually read the context for some reason, haha.

Whatever your opinion on HBD may be, what do you believe the world would look like if the opposite were true

Nobel prize winners, high achievers generally in technical fields, as well as the most accomplished scientists and mathematicians and philosophers as well as would be at most 3%jewish, and at least 10% hispanic, and 10% black. The internet would've led to a wave of achievement from all races and genders. Scott Alexander, who we know because he's intelligent and blogs, wouldn't be jewish - someone of a uniformly distributed race would've done something else instead. Same for Big Yud. Also, intelligence would be less obviously heritable and cluster in families, as it clearly does from any amount of personal experience.

Nobel prize winners, high achievers generally in technical fields, as well as the most accomplished scientists and mathematicians and philosophers as well as would be at most 3%jewish, and at least 10% hispanic, and 10% black.

Can you explain why you think a world where HBD wasn't true would be one with a more equal distribution of Nobel Prize Winners?

There are five Nobel Prizes given out: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Medicine, Literature, and Peace. I'm going to omit the latter two, because they seem highly subjective and more likely to purely be used as political tools (hence Obama winning a Nobel Peace Prize for not being Bush.) So that leaves: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, and Medicine.

Suppose that the Nobel committee is good at awarding genuinely meritorious advances in all of those fields - that everyone who "deserves" such a prize gets one. What needs to be true in order for a person to earn their prize?

Well, first they would need to enter one of those fields of science. I could easily imagine an HBD-less world where an accident of history resulted in black people having a learned, cultural obsession with math, and as a result when a black person is really smart, they almost all go into the field of math and rarely cross over into the Nobel fields. This obviously isn't the case in our world, but I think the basic format of "Black culture pushes all smart black people towards fields A, B and C, which are not among the Nobel fields" is a legitimate answer one could give here.

There's also the component of being able to go to school to become a scientist in the first place. Prior to the GI Bill, only 10% of Americans attended college. Nowadays ~30-40% of people have 4-year degrees. But this shift after the GI Bill didn't lift all boats equally. Many black WWII veterans did not benefit from the GI Bill due to Jim Crow laws, since the program was administered by individual states and those in the South didn't want Black people to benefit. So just as the shift from 10% to 30% of Americans getting college degrees was happening, white people benefited and black people were often denied such benefits. That was 1944 - not that long ago.

It is not that hard to tell a story, where the first generation of "more people going to college" excluded black people, and black people today are still a generation or more behind white people as a result (but look much worse than even that, because they have to compete with white people who have cultivated a "college culture" for two or more generations already.) If one didn't believe in HBD, and leaned more towards cultural explanations, this doesn't seem that far fetched to me - though obviously it would need epicycles to explain black kids adopted by white kids having worse performance, etc.

In any case, I feel like the causal pipeline towards becoming a Nobel prize winner in a world without HBD has to be some combination of:

  • Good genetic endowments (individual variance not group variance - ignore the various paradoxes people bring up)

  • Good fetal environment (no fetal alcohol syndrome, etc., stunting intellectual growth)

  • Good diet (no vitamin deficiencies that stunt intellectual growth, etc.)

  • Good pollution/contaminant levels (no lead poisoning, etc. - I know the "lead poisoning" hypothesis took a blow somewhat recently, but it is illustrative of a possible class of explanations for lack of success)

  • A culture that pushes one towards the Nobel prize fields

  • The ability to receive an education that puts one on the cutting edge of the Nobel prize fields

  • Luck (being in the right time and right place as the questions that lead to an important insight in science finally get asked)

I think there are so many factors that go into all of those that it is hard to make the case that we should see more of this or that group as Nobel prize winners. The US started adding iodine to salt in 1924 (iodine deficiency in pregnant mothers results in lower adult IQ in children), so I don't find it hard to sketch an explanation like:

  • Prior to 1924, black people disproportionately suffered from iodine deficiency, explaining why they weren't Nobel prize winners.

  • In 1923, leaded gasoline was introduced to the market, and not completely phased out in favor of unleaded gasoline until 1996, with black people disproportionately living in cities that ended up in the most contaminated areas due to red-lining.

Leaving the only period where black people might have had a "fair shot" from 1997-2023, and that's assuming we actually did something about environmental lead poisoning. Do you think these explanations are insufficient?

(Obviously, the above has been all very US-centric. But Americans have won about 40% of all Nobel prizes, so the above explanation surely explains some of the gap in Nobel prize achievement. I'm sure the rest of the argument writes itself for people familiar with non-HBD attempts to explain ethnic IQ gaps around the world.)

Can you explain why you think a world where HBD wasn't true would be one with a more equal distribution of Nobel Prize Winners?

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.

I could easily imagine an HBD-less world where an accident of history resulted in black people having a learned, cultural obsession with math, and as a result when a black person is really smart, they almost all go into the field of math and rarely cross over into the Nobel fields

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.

Many black WWII veterans did not benefit from the GI Bill due to Jim Crow laws

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.

Prior to 1924, black people disproportionately suffered from iodine deficiency, explaining why they weren't Nobel prize winners.

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)

with black people disproportionately living in cities that ended up in the most contaminated areas due to red-lining

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)

where the first generation of "more people going to college" excluded black people, and black people today are still a generation or more behind white people as a result

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.

Obviously if HBD were not true, the Jews of Europe would be basket cases after the holocaust suffering under incalculable intergenerational trauma.

Israel would not have been found-able, and we'd see natural forming Ghettos where jews drink themselves to death, abuse heroin at insane rates, have rates of teen pregnancy, sexual assault, and incest vastly worse than even the most remote indigenous communities in north america, test scores that are barely measurable, single digit high-school graduation rates... and a double digit percentage of them wracking up felony convictions often before they can legally drink.

Instead of criticizing their apartheid regime against palestinians or lamenting the Casualties of Isreals various wars we'd be etternally wringing our hands that the Nuremburg laws never ended, that the French and German carceral states were the new face of the holocaust and that european civilization is eternally National Socialist in character... angry students would confront university presidents demanding he answer if he is a nazi, and in his political correctness he'd be unable to deny it... to keep his jo he'd have to weep and lament that jews remain so underpresented, and their graduation rate so abysmal, that an inescapable Nazism must pervade his campus and that he is trying to learn to defeat the hitler in his heart (much as the president of Evergreen didn't feel he could deny he was a white supremacist, but had to make weeping apologies for a white supremacy he would not endorse but could not deny being part of)

The film and entertainment industry would be desperate to shoehorn jewish actors and characters into traditionally white and black roles... and every year at the oscars holywood would make a big show of how many more jews they nominated for high awards... though the more critical commentators would point out they were still underrepresented in the behind the scenes money making positions, and regularly missed top billing.

I think you're conflating being Jewish with being from Toronto.

What does this even mean?

Yes Torontonians are vastly overrepresented in the film industry... (tax credits and architecture that easily plays NYC)... also if you imply Torontonians run Hollywood, then they won't let you work until you apologize for this obviously absurd statement.

Wait, Torotonians are definitionally from Canada, doesn't that mean they should be the ones apologizing?

beautiful

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