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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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White people in x000BC committed a lot of what we'd now call 'violent crime'. Black violent crime seems very culturally contingent (although easily related to IQ in that contingency) - take even a particularly dumb black person and put them in japan as a baby and I don't think you'd get anywhere near american crime rate.

Not convinced 'time preference' is a real thing separate from intelligence, survival as a hunter-gatherer requires a lot of long-term planning, and 'africa was nicer for survival than europe' isn't really true (and even if it was, africa is a big place with lots of variation, there would be niches that were hard to survive in).

Not convinced 'time preference' is a real thing separate from intelligence

Theres MAOA 2R allele which increases chance to be arrested for doing crime significantly yet no effect on intelligence.

I believe candidate gene studies like that didn't replicate, and individual alleles with that large of an effect aren't really a thing.

This doesn't exclude black people having a bunch of different alleles with small individual effects that add up to something big, but that particular allele isn't it.

Most "candidate genes" didn't replicate, but MAOA did. There was also recently replication from Russia (albeit not for 2R, which they got only one individual)

https://psychiatr.ru/files/magazines/2020_04_obozr_1584.pdf

The effect of 2R (in males) is so big that they even compare 2R vs all other, i.e. older-known "bad" 3R allele becomes "good" in this comparison.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24326626/

Effect of low activity MAOA replicates in controlled expirements on mice very well. Main cause you don't hear about it is because of obscurantists.

having a bunch of different alleles with small individual effects that add up to something big

sure there's other alleles which effects add, my point is separation of time preference from intelligence is already established, and burden of proof on you.

and 'africa was nicer for survival than europe' isn't really true

Now many species of Primates inhabit Africa, and how many inhabit Europe?

there would be niches that were hard to survive in).

Like which ones?