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Notes -
White power
/s
Happy Diwali to my man J.D. Vance. In which, a Colored pagan gives white people more reasons to feel superior. Now with conclusive genetic data to back it.
In Scott's 'links for November' he shares:
Curious pattern matchers will find another identical graph in the paper. The intelligence graph coincides perfectly with....drum roll please...... yes, it's white skin and hair color.
Conclusive proof tying whiteness to intelligence! Nazis --> elated, Data --> supported, immigrants --> deported. Don't @ me bro
I thought I was cherry picking. But nope. No other graph superimposes this nicely with intelligence. (other graphs)
I'm surprised white supremacists didn't pounce on this immediately. I don't expect them to read. But still.....
Now what, 2000 more words about a stupid graph ? Yes ! But I'm more interested in trends within the intelligence graph over time, rather than what it means for white faces and blonde hair. The intelligence graph has inflection points which leads me to divide European history into distinct eras based around these points. Let's talk about these eras instead.
Reverse engineering history from kinks in intelligence genomic graphs :
The intelligence graph has a few distinct trend reversals. Those key reversals / phases eye balled with 250 yr tolerance on either side are:
What (spurious?) co-relations can we draw ?
7000 - 4500 BC:
The sharp rise corresponds to the Neolithic expansion. Agriculture spread and Near-East farmers started replacing native hunter gatherers.
3500- 3000 BC:
Sharp drop coincides with the Yamnaya expansion. It is in full swing, going deep into Europe. Big L for Skin heads. Aryans made them stupider.
1500BC - 500 BC:
Steady rise coincides with Bronze age collapse. But, not major genetic changes. This makes sense in context of the white-skin preference graph. It doesn't reflect any major change during that time. Might have been a purely cultural change or noisy data.
500BC - 1200AD steady decline:
I like this one. The Greek and Romans did not perform much population replacement, so the steadiness in genetics is to be expected. Germanic, Viking, Slavic & Celtic people performed some 'population replacement', but there isn’t one inciting genetic factor. On the other hand, This steady decline coincides with the continent’s biggest cultural phenomenon : Christianity. Another L for the skin heads.
1200AD++ steady increase:
Turns out, there's minimal lasting genetic impact owing to mongols or black death. So, I'll discard them. This increase appears cultural. Renaissance happens in 12th century, the technology hockey-stick begins and with it what I expect was positive selection for IQ.
If my (potentially spurious) correlations are to be believed, ancestral pillars of white identity (Yamnaya Aryans and early Christians) suppressed intelligence than promoting it. I'd love to see a global intelligence graph over the same period,. That way I can view relative impact instead of absolutes.
"There are 3 kind of lies : Lies, Damn lies and Statistics"
In closing, was whiteness good for European intelligence ? Idk, I remain confused.
P.S: Yes, I am extrapolating from one paper and drawing correlations over correlations. Don't take this as gospel. Please.
Firstly, I don't know if you can assess intelligence from ancient populations.
We can go to West Africa or Haiti today and see 'ok these people aren't that smart', test genes and compare with other populations today. We can draw upon all kinds of data and observations from real countries, real peoples that exist today.
But 3000 years ago? 8000 years ago? Why was the Bronze Age collapse so good for IQ, such that it took us ages to recover to that peak level of intellect? Were the Sea People the true bringers of enrichment and diversity? We just don't know. Who can say what we're really graphing here, there could be a million confounders we don't know about.
Secondly, call me high-time preference but I'm interested in the here and now. So what if Meds, Hittites and ancient Egyptians had masterful civilizations while the Germanics were carving ugly wooden faces? Ancient Egypt is gone now. The Greece of Plato and Aristotle is gone now. Rome is gone. Byzantium is gone. We see ruins and read stories about peoples who don't exist anymore, places that lost their relevance. We can construct stories about how the dirty Asiatics brought Christianity with them to displace proper European religion but it's all just conjecture, we weren't there at the time. Our knowledge of this period is vanishingly small.
Let's focus on not becoming ancient history for someone else to ponder over.
Crises, especially ones with a large risk of death tend to drive evolution. Who got to survive after a collapse? Smart people with a higher time preference survived because they were the ones prepared to survive the collapse and to rebuild afterwards. The ones who die are the ones who are dumb and therefore do stupid things to kill themselves, are unable to plan ahead, and lack a solid work ethic.
Now the reverse is true of High Civilization like Greece and Rome. We say it ourselves — good times make weak men. The Greeks and Romans used slaves for everything and had a pretty decent welfare state in Rome itself. The chief problem for Rome was a large class of unemployed in Rome who had to be entertained. In such a city, one could live a comfortable life and never have to break a sweat doing anything productive. And so if you were lazy, stupid, and uninterested in working or getting educated, not a problem. And so while those people die quickly in a collapse, they didn’t really suffer all that much in Rome. So those types would definitely lower the IQ of classic civilization.
Have you lived or witnessed close by a collapse? From my experience with the fall of the communism it is not the type of person that you described that thrived.
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You mean, smart people with a lower time preference.
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Doesn't this risk being a just-so story? It's not clear to me why a civilisational collapse or dark age would necessarily favour smart people with a higher time preference - you can probably argue just as easily that it would favour impulsive and violent people, because short-term aggression is more valuable in a time of instability. Long-term planning and building is more valuable in a time stable enough for generational or intergenerational investment to bear fruit.
Crises tend to favour fast strategies - and surely you could argue that fast strategies will value IQ less than slow strategies, and so you might expect average IQ to go down through a crisis.
To be clear, I'm not asserting that this is definitely the case. It just seems at least as plausible to me as the theory that crises favour people with higher IQs. I have no strong opinion on how crises influence the genetics of IQ.
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