site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32857 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

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.

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

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

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 in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats