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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5404 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

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?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Ever wonder how the world's bluest person starts engaging with reactionary thought and HBD honestly? It's the power of (strike)rationality(strike) volunteering in Haiti and seeing every western institution replicated in cargo cult form.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150407223525/http://squid314.livejournal.com/297579.html

Excerpt:

"It has proven hard for me to appreciate exactly how confused the Haitians are about some things. Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don't understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just "they don't want to do it" or "it never occurred to them", but after months and months of attempted explanation they don't understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy - harrowing at the best of times - positively unbearable."

Chicken or egg? The converse is that after spending a few years in east Africa you realize that the dude living in a dirt-floor hut who speaks multiple languages fluently and could run circles around the median ivy-league grad student is the norm rather than the exception because anyone who isn't speaking at least two languages and working three side hustles either emigrated or starved to death decades ago.

The norm? There are ofc plenty of africans who could succeed in academia, but in a country where average iq is optimistically, ~ 82 (2010) and gdp/capita is 1k - 10k ... how can they compare to a median iq of (from harvard undergrads in 2002, but should ballpark grad students) 128? You aren't just saying 'africans are as smart as random americans', you're comparing africans to americans who are heavily selected for test scores and academic achievement (even the AA-admitted blacks or hispanics are still the best available). (Even if the average white/black iq difference is entirely environmental, that still applies - starving, parasites, malaria, etc as a child does make one dumber).

Yes, "the norm" because mental plasticity, resilience, and ability to recognize and intergrate new information is only tangentially (if at all) related how high one scores on an IQ test. Ditto "academic achievement".

Do you think IQ measures anything of meaning?

Africa has ~1.4B people. If at least 500M of those are as able to recognize and integrate new information as the median ivy-league grad - does that mean, e.g., most of them could learn to code and be productive software engineers? Or be productive research scientists?

If that was true ... bryan caplan guessed open borders would double world GDP. But unlocking the potential of 500M people, who can do complex technical work only done by a few % of the american population would quadruple it, at least. We must abolish borders, and teach all the refugees javascript.

... unless your point was merely a dig at ivy league grads, implying they're just as capable as the average american and african. But that's just facially untrue, observing the technical accomplishments of (some) ivy league grads, even in areas totally unrelated to prestige like 'anonymous internet software development', many of them are much smarter than the average. yud post Competent Elites

(he's generally right, although lmao at "smart enough for your cognitive mechanisms to reliably decide to sign up for cryonics" as a measure of intelligence as an example for "astronomically high threshold of intelligence + experience + rationality before a screwup becomes surprising" - looks like not making mistakes is quite hard)

The use of 'ivy league grads' in that statement just makes it confusing - yeah, it insults the lib elites, but I now have no idea how smart you're implying the african actually is!

Do you think IQ measures anything of meaning?

I think it's positively correlated with things like conscientiousness and academic inclination, but I don't think it actually measures the thing that IQ fetishists like to believe that it measures, IE genuine intelligence or competency. It's Ironic that you should bring up Bryan Caplan because in my view he is perhaps one of the quintessential examples of someone who is academically accomplished, and clearly has a very high IQ, while simultaneously being a fucking moron.

As for how smart I think the average African is, I'd say they're on par with the average used car salesman here in the states and while some might see that as a "diss" that's whole lot smarter than a lot of folks here, especially the gay autistic Bay Area crowd, give them credit for. Fact is that I've met more idiots with prestigious degrees, than I've met idiots in living Africa or working in sales. My theory regarding the mechanism is that societies and trades with less wealth and narrower margins don't have the luxury of tolerating incompetence and/or free riders to the degree that academia does.

Your average car salesman can sort alphabetically.

It appears you use 'intelligence' is sense 'personality which I like'. This is not a useful meaning.

So can the average African, and I could just easily accuse you and the rest of the rat-sphere pf doing the same. Equating Intelligence with nueroticism and holding blue-tribe values rather than ability to think

So can the average African,

Source? Do you think Scott just badmouthed Haitians when wrote they had problem with numerical sorting?

I could just easily accuse you and the rest of the rat-sphere pf doing the same.

Based on which posts?

Equating Intelligence with nueroticism and holding blue-tribe values rather than ability to think

You were just provided with a source that IQ has very weak negative correlation in this comment

https://www.themotte.org/post/327/making-cognitive-enhancement-palatable/56895?context=8#context

and now you repeat this...

Does it tell something to you if a right-winger (are pro-HBD more likely to be right-wing?) says that intelligence correlates with blue-tribe values (which is weak, anyway; I'm lazy, no source)

You are a military man. Does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000 tell something to you? Isn't it a real-life experiment confirming vailidity of IQ?

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