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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31782 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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My rule of thumb for HackerNews with regard to wrongthink is: if the username looks like a real name, then opinion discarded – at best, it's some sellout mid-career manager with a reputation at stake, in fact he's likely posting not out of genuine interest but only to neurotically reinforce his reputation, a highly compensated yet politically powerless peasant quaking in his boots at the thought of angering the HR Inner Party cat lady sovereign – if she were to check and see him being the first to stop the applause. At worst, something lobotomized and ChatGPT-like, impervious to logic.

If it's some random alphanumeric string or witty nonsense, that's perhaps a hacker or at least a thinking person, and worth a read.

jasonhansel

Website: https://jasonhansel.com

I'd said only that he expressed sympathy for neoreactionaries, and the above Twitter thread proves my point.

...

HideousKojima

The author of the linked article is a heretic from left-wing ideological orthodoxy, and therefore you should disregard anything he has to say on any topic whatsoever, no matter how well or poorly argued. After all, you don't want to associate with heretics, right?

Case in point.

Compared to TheMotte it's markedly worse, for the aforementioned reason of HN being a good boy pageant rather than a pseudonymous discussion forum of people selected for having issues with orthodoxy. Fundamentally it's the same because there is no penalty for trotting out the same two-bit, long-discredited gotchas (muh «race boundaries are nebulous», «the Irish were dumber, checkmate» etc), therefore no progress is being made and, indeed, there is a regression in cumulative knowledge with attrition of the best. Then again, no community of notable size satisfies this criterion – as far as these topics are concerned.

Scott's wrongthink in this case is so anodyne I think it's more interesting that Topher Brennan (incidentally the gender theorist Ozy Brennan's, nee Franz', husband and father of her child – guess some people just never get over their inferiority complex) believed it to be a decent attack vector, and judging by those discussions it is giving some people enough to work with. I doubt they even read it – they just skim to confirm that on the level of sentiment he's pro-HBD – and therefore definitely pro-racism, and likely pro-white supremacy and Nazism to boot.

Confirmation bias works the same way for any belief system – with pizzagates and voter frauds just as well as with suspicions of progressives. You need tremendous social capital to merely earn a hearing from a person, and not an adversarial sentiment classifier.

HN is liberal but it's a peculiar kind of liberalism . It's like, "we want this big social safety net, we believe that there are these major social problems like loneliness, depression, teen anxiety, etc. , and we want this big government to enforce labor laws, antitrust, environmental laws, help Ukraine, etc., but we don't want to have to pay higher taxes to fund it or solve these problems."

I read HN daily and have found some of its threads to be incredibly important for understanding how organizations work. That being said, it gets hilarious consistently on two fronts:

  1. When the largely Software Engineering (SWE) crowd comments on something larger and complex outside of their domain of expertise. I can't think of a good example of late, but it always goes the same way -- the SWEs analyze the problem as a linear system to be optimized, point to the stupidly obvious inflection point and go "lol the normies are too dumb to fix it" while blindly missing all of the second and third order implications of that change to the system. This hints at their cavalier attitudes and, frankly, to a certain laziness. I've seen SWEs who should know better bork production systems because of some off-the-cuff optimization. The default response is always "Oh, shit, yeah, sorry ... here, here, that's an easy fix." Well, then we're playing a game of fix one bug and cause 3 more. The hubris is real.

Which makes the second thing odd:

  1. So, so, so many of HN posters have had negative experiences that made them deeply permanently insecure. I'm not trying to be cute when I say this - they're all literally nerds. Somebody bullied them in high school, or the cute girl in their philosophy class friendzoned them. It's weird how often personal attacks and highly emotional reasoning are levied in there, what with them being a self-avowedly "rational" crowd. Everyone's a human and everyone has emotions. You're allowed to feel however the hell you want, but life gets easier if you control how you act. There's a childishness.

The other thing I've noticed reading HN daily now for close to a decade is that the typical individual contributor software job, even at FAANGs, is a shitty bill of goods being sold. For a really precise timeframe, about 2005-2020, the "rest and vest, work 20 hours a week" strategy worked and did make multimillionaries of state-school slackers. Those days are over - for everyone! New CS kids are (a) oversaturating the market and (b) not actually competent. The greybeards are encountering the fact that ageism is real and they never learned how to actually work with people, so trying to step up to a manager role is really fucking hard for them. And, the low hanging fruit has all been picked. AdTech and basic social network building is either done or dominated. The new problems are harder and require way more end-to-end thought and not lazy hot fixes. There was a thread maybe a month ago asking what being a professional dev was like in the 80s and 90s .... all the dinosaurs who came out said shit like "compiling took forever and we couldn't really snapshot-and-rollback the way you can today .... we had to test the shit out of our code and think through corner cases. We would have day long whiteboarding sessions where we ended up worse off than we started."

if the username looks like a real name, then opinion discarded – at best, it's some sellout

In the subthread that was linked up above, the guy doing most of the accusing is tptacek. That's Thomas Ptacek, and he's one of the industry experts in the field of cryptography. He doesn't have anything to prove. When he says something about crypto, everyone listens. So I'm pretty disappointed to see that he's got such a closed mind about this. But your heuristic is definitely failing here.

Sorry can't hear you over the sound of my heuristic working as always: as I said, «with regard to wrongthink».

Your crypto heroes are made of cardboard. Find people with backbone next time: technical chops are merely luck of the genetic draw.

In the meantime I'll be reading my homie wjhbr.

I'm rooting for Tharg, personally.

Agreed on all points, but:

the Irish were dumber, checkmate

I think there is something important here. If we were in the 70s, we would likely think that the Irish were genetically predisposed to low IQ. IQ data at the time would clearly imply that.

But then, after some economic development, they increased to regular white people IQ levels. So it wasn't bad DNA, it was economic circumstances decreasing their average mental ability.

That's great news. It may be possible to significantly improve populations' mental abilities merely through cultural and economic changes. Frankly, many Sub-Saharan populations are in a sorry state. But that may be largely economic and not that they have a set of "dumb genes".

It worked for the Irish, if we're lucky it'll work for other populations too.

Ho ho ho, I've complained about this one before, so let me reduce the broth down to its essence: anything Richard Lynn says about Irish IQ scores is politically motivated bullshit.

Very conveniently for him that the rebellious Paddies in the South are dumber (science says so!) than the loyal subjects of Empire in the North, who in turn are not quite as smart as the minor province on the mainland (the Scots) until we get to the peak and pinnacle of the British Isles, the most intelligent who live in London (naturally).

I'm not saying there isn't any data there, but he took data from two (yes, just two) IQ tests done in the 70s, kludged them together, then declared the Irish (rum Romanism and rebellion subset) had an IQ of 95. Everyone and their dog then quoted this as Gospel when writing news reports.

Later, better testing comes along and well well lookit dat: the Irish (priest-ridden Southern revolting subset) turn out to be human after all.

EDIT: There is something to the notion of better education, economic improvement and the like, I won't deny it. But the seeming jump of about 10-15 IQ points is not down to "suddenly, via progress, the Irish developed brains between one generation and another" as much as it is "modernisation produced a generation better schooled and better at test-taking, along with the environmental causes that are attributed to the Flynn Effect".

Hey, Ireland at least had 1 scientific Nobel - Physics in 1951. They have a very small population too, so their scientific contribution isn't puny in relative terms. They got another in 2015.

The entire black world has only 1 non-Peace, non-Literature Nobel today, it was awarded in 1979 for Economics. The population involved is at least 100 times higher than that of Ireland, including many wealthy chunks (in the US and Carribean).

There are clearly economic effects on which countries get Nobels, who has an expensive scientific-technological establishment. But there's also intelligence and organization. China was getting STEM Nobels in the 1950s and 1970s, when its economic situation was catastrophic. India got a few STEM Nobels when it was very poor too. So did Pakistan.

I did not include this example frivolously. Not sure how it would have looked like to us back in the 70s, but in the 2022... 2023 it's fair to say that we have never had a decent scientific reason to think that the Irish are unusually dumb, whether for genetic or for environmental reasons (Sure would be nice if they have discovered the pot of gold secret sauce others can use). Russell Warne, Dec 2022:

On the environmentalist side, some have noticed that the estimated mean IQ Ireland has increased noticeably in the late 20th century. Unz (2012), for example, used Lynn’s data to identify a 13-point increase from 1972 (IQ = 87) to 2000 (IQ = 100). Lynn’s international IQs are standardized so that the British mean is 100. Therefore, these numbers would indicate that the Irish-British IQ gap decreased from 13 points to . . . zero in just a generation. My colleague, Wilfred Reilly, also sees a massive increase in Irish IQ.

The first example I could see of any scientist isolating Irish IQs as being particularly low was Hans Eysenck. In 1971, he proposed that selective immigration over the centuries had lowered the average IQ of the population remaining in Ireland. His basis for this view was a study by MacNamara (1966) which “. . . found the Irish to have IQs which were not very different from those observed in American negroes, and far below comparable English samples” (Eysenck, 1971, p. 127).

This single quote from a book aimed at the general public not only created the belief in low Irish IQ, but also linked the topic to the interracial IQ gap in the United States.

In total, I found 55 samples that reported data from 28,741 examinees. The sample sizes ranged from 1 to 4,215 (median = 170, SD = 887.3), and were collected between 1916 and 2015. The unweighted mean IQ was 98.3 (median = 97.4, SD = 8.9). All the data were collected in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, or the United States.

The weighted mean of all these scores is 97.2. At the study level, there is a slight linear trend (r = .268), where later studies report higher means. But when the data are weighted by sample size, this correlation disappears (r = -.082). It is clear that there has not been a massive increase in Irish IQ during the 20th or 21st centuries.

For Eysenck specifically, there seems to have been an eagerness to subscribe to his preferred interpretation of the data. Eysenck’s (1971, p. 127) claim that MacNamara (1966) showed that Irish IQs were “. . . not very different from those observed in American negroes, and far below comparable English samples” simply is not true. The relevant data in MacNamara’s book shows IQs from a non-verbal test and a verbal test, the Moray House Test (MacNamara, 1966, p. 101, Table 11.1). This table divides the sample into six groups, in ascending order of the degree of the use of the Irish language in instruction in school. The IQs range from 91.9 to 102.9, with a weighted mean of 100.3 — which is almost exactly equal to the British mean on these tests (not the African American mean on similar tests). Eysenck ignored this data in MacNamara’s study.

From here.

Sorry to say, I think we still don't have anything more whitepilling than the generic g-hollow Flynn effect. The Irish never were dumber than (say, Eastern European) whites, and they haven't become appreciably smarter. Also: they haven't been non-white in the past, and they haven't become any whiter since then.

I've recently mentioned how Eysenck's book of tests has discredited IQ research in Russia.

On a more meta level, it's fascinating how such insubstantial but evocative and viral tidbits get injected into the conversation, to feed people's hopes or prejudices and crowd out truths.

Grey goo and Paperclippy and Basilisk and other trash in our domain, probably.

they haven't been non-white in the past, and they haven't become any whiter since then.

But we are the descendants of an African tribe that intermingled with the degraded and isolated survivors of the Stone Age:

The Iberians are believed to have been originally an African race, who thousands of years ago spread themselves through Spain over Western Europe. Their remains are found in the barrows, or burying places, in sundry parts of these countries. The skulls are of low prognathous type. They came to Ireland and mixed with the natives of the South and West, who themselves are supposed to have been of low type and descendants of savages of the Stone Age, who, in consequence of isolation from the rest of the world, had never been out-competed in the healthy struggle of life, and thus made way, according to the laws of nature, for superior races.

H. Strickland Constable, “Ireland from One or Two Neglected Points of View”, 1899

Well, geeze. That was my strongest racial IQ white pill.

Thanks for explaining the issues with it.

I'll still hold out some evidence-lacking hope that deworming and better nutrition can seriously help the poorer sorts of Africans. But maybe their IQs won't increase beyond expected Flynn effect gains due to improving schooling.

Similar to Reddit's 'default subs', leave your 'red pills' takes at the door; you are just going to get downvoted to oblivion or even banned. No one is going to see the light.

likely pro-white supremacy and Nazism

Which, Scott being Jewish, just makes it even more hilariously stupid. Ah yes, Nazism. The philosophy of the Nazis. The Nazis of the National Socialist Party. Remind me again, they thought the Jewish people were the most incredible in the world, right? That's why Scott is naturally attracted to their ideology, yes?

(I can get along with Ozy even though I disagree with about 90% of everything they support. I know nothing at all about Brennan, save that this email dump for no perceptible reason seemed like spite and envy. Even the Rationalists can't avoid interpersonal drama, it would seem. Human after all!)

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