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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31254 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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As is often brought up on this, the sin of comparing racial IQ belongs to the woke and the info hazard is the notion that we should take seriously racial outcome data with the implicit belief that there is no racial gap and thus some other force must exist that hampers black excellence. The crusade to find and eradicate this force has not been without costs and those costs only rise as the desperation to find a cause is frustrated by the most likely candidates, culture and genetics, not being allowed to be examined. I do not hate low intelligence whites and I do not hate low intelligence blacks. I am not resentful to higher intelligence people of any color. This difference does not need to destroy us but it may anyways, and if it does it will not be the fault of the people on the side of truth.

The crusade to find and eradicate this force has not been without costs and those costs only rise as the desperation to find a cause is frustrated by the most likely candidates, culture and genetics are not allowed to be examined.

I agree, but talking about race & IQ just strengthens this crusade in practice. Talking about race & IQ causes people to correctly worry about a Nazi resurgence for the reasons I stated, which strengthens the left, which strengthens the crusade.

Emphasizing constructive responses based on culture and environmental factors is a way to redirect left-wing energy in a productive direction, and should be considered preferable to race & IQ talk.

Emphasizing constructive responses based on culture and environmental factors is a way to redirect left-wing energy in a productive direction, and should be considered preferable to race & IQ talk.

Unless those environmental factors too conspicuously seem to not pan out, it creates a system that selects for the least falsifiable explanations because they best survive falsification. And these explanations are becoming more and more unhinged. We have progressed to math being a racist product of white people. And that's the safer theory, the much more popular theory that one sometimes hears is that it is white racism that holds blacks back. This does not go anywhere good, mountains of corpses await us on this path. The failure of purges that cannot succeed proving the need for more purges.

I agree, but talking about race & IQ just strengthens this crusade in practice. Talking about race & IQ causes people to correctly worry about a Nazi resurgence for the reasons I stated, which strengthens the left, which strengthens the crusade.

This is only because you insist on framing it this way. Anglos are shorter than the Dutch on average, it's a brute fact. It is unfortunate for English Basketball teams. But no one is genociding the English over it, even in the Netherlands. We can acknowledge that different populations have different average traits even IQs and the effects this has on things like ivy league representation and not become nazis. The fact that you think the only thing holding us back from Nazism is this noble lie is truly horrifying to me.

I've been needing to say this more frequently here and it's starting to trouble me, noble lies do not work. Truth is a vengeful enemy that all must eventually submit to. When you promise these people that all are blank slates and that you can fix the systems to make us all equal they will eventually find out that you were lying and they will eat you alive and you will deserve it.

We seem to have undergone some phase change overnight, the consensus moving from «IQ gap exists, but is very likely not genetic in origin» to «IQ gap is meaningless» to «there is no IQ gap, shut up you Nazi». And it's not a few extreme crazies. This guy from OpenAI says:

Look, I don't know what to tell you. I'm no woke leftist. But when a lot of people line up to defend "Black people are stupider than white people" as merely offensive but basically true and an excusable thing to say, that's just racism.

It reminds me of the days before the war, with rushed, cowardly final preparations, ass-covering formalities. At the time it wasn't obvious where this was going.

The king is as naked /the deer is as unhorselike as ever; but the king's guard are sufficiently powerful now for that detail to be inconsequential. Databases are being closed off, papers retracted without justification, tenures canceled, and reasonable folks are falling over themselves to demonstrate their outrage at the very idea that Bostrom's factual claim is conceivably true or «excusable» – as if this claim weren't common knowledge just a few years ago, with them perfectly positioned to know this. They deny their Kolmogorov complicity, hoping others won't call them out on this bullshit, for the same ass-covering reasons.

I wonder if our resident anti-HBD folks like @Amadan will follow suit? Had Oceania always been at war with Eurasia? Was there ever any IQ gap? Is this just some Mandela effect, or was this about «chuds» posting fake graphs?

I have always expected something like this to happen in case of the disappearance of plausible alternatives to the American project. There's nowhere to run to, no sovereigns which aren't existential enemies, so the freedom circus can just be turned off, bit by bit. This is mostly a blip, and not the most significant issue anyway. We'll see more of such turnkey consensus events. And of course the wave of AI misinformation will cover the tracks just fine.

I don't think it's a phase change, so much as a long-existing deep aversion to racism among normal people. The same people would've probably disliked 'blacks are dumber than whites' five years ago too - I've played the same game bostrom did "just use the plain meanings of the word dumb, it's literally true!" and got the same response he is now.

Meanwhile, the anti-racist genetic scientists still aren't denying that IQ exists - vox 2017, motherjones 2019 which claims "the black-white IQ gap has narrowed. Roughly speaking, it was about 15 points in 1970 and it’s about 10 points now". Even kevin bird c. sep 2022 isn't denying a gap exists, just claiming it isn't genetic.

Bird, for all his faults, is working in genetics, and is better-acquainted with the relevant literature than 95-99% of people pontificating on race and IQ. This isn't about domain experts: this is about the popular sentiment of EAs. IQ differences were common knowledge. I observe this changing.

People may feel arbitrarily strongly about racism, but Bostrom's claim was and is factual, and he is called out for not repudiating it. He maintains that Black people have lower IQs, and is not saved by couching it in polite, defensive and academic verbiage. They're not merely arguing that the attitude of his original text is inexcusable – they're saying he has not budged on the substance of that «racism».

Edit: here's a good example.

These views are widely repudiated, are based on a long history of racist pseudoscience and must be rejected, especially given their recent rise in popularity. By contrast, we will see in our examination of Bostrom’s apology that Bostrom not only endorses these views, but also leaves room for exactly the sort of pseudoscientific explanation that the rest of us have learned to condemn for what it is: scientific racism.

The view that racial differences in intelligence exist, have a genetic basis, and in fact explain racism was openly expressed by at least one other commentator, who was defended rather than attacked for expressing it.

As we have seen, that is not a fair characterization of the Extropians’ activities. Extropians at the time were actively involved in expressing and disseminating a range of offensive, racist and bigoted views. Bostrom’s email from 1996 should be read in the same context as any of these other expressions, as part of a movement suffused with bigotry that took its activities from the internet onto college campuses with a direct intention to intimidate almost half of the incoming MIT freshman class and cause them to feel unwelcome and undeserving of their status on campus.

A user recently submitted a comment which drew on the racist and scientifically dubious writings of Dr. Philippe Rushton and Dr. Arthur Jensen to argue that we should leave open the possibility of a significant IQ gap between racial groups grounded in underlying genetic causes.

Rushton’s own department issued the following statement characterizing his work:

[some goobledygook]

The article by Rushton and Jensen cited by this commentator (to which I will not link) was immediately repudiated by the scientific community. A response by the eminent psychologist Richard Nisbett showed:

J. P. Rushton and A. R. Jensen (2005) ignore or misinterpret most of the evidence of greatest relevance to the question of heritability of the Black–White IQ gap. A dispassionate reading of the evidence on the association of IQ with degree of European ancestry for members of Black populations, convergence of Black and White IQ in recent years, alterability of Black IQ by intervention programs, and adoption studies lend no support to a hereditarian interpretation of the Black–White IQ gap. On the contrary, the evidence most relevant to the question indicates that the genetic contribution to the Black–White IQ gap is nil.

Nisbett, “Heredity, environment, and race differences in IQ: A commentary on Rushton and Jensen (2005)“

This blog is not, and will never become a forum for airing discredited scientific theories in the support of racist ideology.

It looks like the time has come for me to introduce a comments policy to prevent future misbehavior. Comments are closed on this thread. If you want to discuss the content of this post, email me at ineffectivealtruismeditor@gmail.com.

Note how he cleverly (not really) shifts from IQ difference to genetics.

... huh, lukas gloor claims

Given the above, it seems possible to me that genetic influences also play a role. It seems plausible on priors (would be a coincidence if all groups are the same in all regards), we have some precedent for group differences (I think the research on Ashkenazi jews having higher average IQ is less controversial?), and it can't fill you with confidence in the other position when we can observe how some people are morally confused so they think the topic is so politically dangerous that they feel the need to lie about things (e.g., in the Sam Harris context, but also recent EA twitter threads I've seen go in that direction).

to positive score

Look, I'm not saying that blank slatism/IQ equality is an undisputed consensus. But you point to old hands, people who are aware of what I call common knowledge. This is the new school of EA.

The situation is developing quickly. I wonder what the equilibrium willl be. Probably the same one we had on /r/slatestarcodex post HBD and CW ban, mutatis mutandis.

I thought that account was satire but I guess not.

Repeat after me: "I unequivocally reject all forms of racist pseudoscience" and "people of color are not genetically inferior to anyone else". They are simple words. Say them.

Atheists would rather say that than the Nicene Creed:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages. Light of Light; true God of true God; begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father, by whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man. And He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried. And the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead; whose Kingdom shall have no end.

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