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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3876 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Any more accounts on twitter like @crimkadid? I think the technical term for him and his ilk is a schizoposter (if not please correct me). But he seems to randomly tweet about topics such as autism, IQ, sociology and history. Kinda hard to summarise but it is one of those accounts that likes to post various in depth threads of a topic matter they are (supposedly) well versed in.

I'd like to see more of these accounts. I like the fact that there are minimal jokes and pop culture references and has what feels like an extremely high information density. If you know of anything similar, let me know.

He's not exactly a schizoposter, schizoposters are more openly crazy, but he's def related. I haven't read his most recent thread - but his output before that was uniformly just nonsense, and there wasn't any truth or value in it whatsoever, not even in an 'adjacent to truth' sense. Not that there aren't 'edgy dissident' claims/accounts that are valuable, but they're outnumbered by nonsense by several orders of magnitude, and telling the difference takes effort. A similar account is @realhumanschwab, whose output is similarly nonsense and without value.

I haven't read his most recent thread - but his output before that was uniformly just nonsense, and there wasn't any truth or value in it whatsoever, not even in an 'adjacent to truth' sense.

On that basis are you saying this? His inferences are straining credulity, but he cites genuine data.

Well Galton got further than 90% of modern social scientists (whose received wisdom still looks like this) with just that plus a bit of math. Directionally the same, it seems, happened for the whole Hajnal line discourse, Indian Aryan issue and other topics. We've been hearing a lot of cackling from the wannabe sophisticateds about stupid racist nazi chuds obsessed with foreheads and brow heights or using CaLiPeRS to reach conclusions about intelligence; but time and time again it seems like calipers work to an extent. So I think there are grounds for cautious optimism about this approach.

Pre-20th century, or perhaps more to the point, pre-Civil Rights guys were less technically informed but also less mindkilled and could reason freely on the basis of what is now unattainable purity of real experience; explicitly rechecking and refining their intuitions with modern tools could be a legitimate way to revitalize anthropology in the broadest sense.

That said, wilder schizoposter accs are merely riffing off the aesthetic of gentlemen scientists, if not scholars of the occult.

See edits.

Anyway, what I'm asserting is that the presence of bluster of this kind is not enough to disqualify the proposition as «uniformly just nonsense». Something like 25% of Uriah's conjectures may well prove correct. If I were to bet on it, I'd say that brachycephalization-domestication thesis, episodic memory vs. «stamp collecting» adaptations and the bit about Oceanian quivering smell less like bullshit than Japanese Omega-3 one, but all of it is within the realm of sane academic hypotheses, if not Overton-compliant ones.

Milk Lobe is... controversial in my mind.

brachycephalization-domestication thesis

Wouldn't domestication proceed by subtle neurological changes, rather than bulk physical ones? Genetic variation in temperament exists, and wouldn't selection on that make much more sense than head-shape?

episodic memory vs stamp collecting

I guess that's from this? The thread also includes brachycephaly claims as part of a claims that 'northern europeans are smarter than all the other ones'. And that claim isn't true afaict? Spain and italy don't have significantly lower national IQs than norway/UK/germany/france (according to lynn 2010, 98/97 vs 99/100, which is just not enough for any claimed large difference, and plausibly explained by migration). The lactose tolerance thing also doesn't seem plausible. But directly about episodic memory vs stamp collecting: I can't find any 'data' on this, but I personally know several europeans and several jews with extremely good 'episodic memory', and several europeans and several jews with very poor 'episodic memory' - and generally intelligence isn't just made up of 'memory', but much more complicated, i think, so looking at large differences in intelligence in terms of 'being caused by memory types' is just confused, imo.

I couldn't figure out what 'oceanic quivering' is by searching 'from:crimkadid' on twitter so idk.

You mention galton:

Galton produced over 340 papers and books. He also created the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies. He was a pioneer of eugenics, coining the term itself in 1883, and also coined the phrase "nature versus nurture".[2] His book Hereditary Genius (1869) was the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness.[3]

crimkadid isn't doing anything like that. He should, and I'd be interested if he was, but he won't.

Wouldn't domestication proceed by subtle neurological changes, rather than bulk physical ones? Genetic variation in temperament exists, and wouldn't selection on that make much more sense than head-shape?

False dichotomy bordering on the absurdity heuristic; subtle changes in cell behavior may be evolutionarily easy to reach (particularly on timescales he discusses, i.e. dozens of generations) though selection on pathways that affect embryonic cell migration and, say, characteristic relative white matter tract lengths and thus gross anatomy, and not strictly on microscopic scale; and indeed, if head shape as such is not being strongly selected upon, it can be thrown around by apparently unrelated pressures. Specifically, domestication syndrome in animals corresponds to allometric cranial changes; there is a (fairly contested) model attributing it to neural crest alterations.

For all I know, within-population temperamental variation is still linked to head shape in the way he describes. I admit I haven't checked.

Spain and italy don't have significantly lower national IQs than norway/UK/germany/france (according to lynn 2010, 98/97 vs 99/100

According to Lynn, speaking of Italy as a coherent population with some average IQ is very misguided, Sicilians don't even crack 90 while Northerners get to 103. I am not sure about Spain but it does seem to me that, indeed, an average native German is more than 1 point above a Spaniard, and Scandis are obviously not «99/100». In at least one large sample of elderly Western Europeans, there is a gamut of over 1 SD in «categorical fluency» and «episodic memory» task performances. (Admittedly, contra Uriah, they are correlated).

4 points aren't nothing on the population level.

Why you say this is explained by migration is beyond me; migration can explain many distributions, but that's a minor elaboration on selection.

generally intelligence isn't just made up of 'memory', but much more complicated

Sure, but come on now, he doesn't assert that it is.

I couldn't figure out what 'oceanic quivering' is by searching 'from:crimkadid' on twitter so idk.

https://twitter.com/crimkadid/status/1264785819870601216

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