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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5340 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.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I've been researching HBD for the first time lately.

Question: Could acknowledging HBD have any underappreciated benefits?

Although there is valid concern that it may be exploited by bad actors (such as white nationalists), the idea that intelligence being genetic (and therefore outside our control) could potentially reduce stress for Black Americans.

No more nagging from conservatives about pulling your bootstraps.

Not nearly enough effort, nor sufficient evidence or argumentation for the topic. Don't post like this. No, not even when you roll new accounts.

Maybe I just don't understand HBD but does accepting it mean giving up on looking for improvements via culture? If not then there's still plenty of room for nagging.

does accepting it mean giving up on looking for improvements via culture?

Not necessarily, but if you were looking for an excuse to give up, it's a fantastic and instant argument-terminating justification to do that.

Of course, it's worth noting that literally everyone accepts HBD on a who-whom basis; group-level biological differences are the current go-to justification to discriminate against men and anyone under 25 in the same way they were used to excuse racial discrimination 50+ years ago.

I believe the easiest counter-argument is that using scientific racism/sexism/ageism HBD to do discriminatory things has a dysgenic effect on that population; if you treat all a group's members to slightly below their average, it means that any individual with an objectively positive deviation from that average is not rewarded for that as strongly as they would be if the background assumption was that they were that capable in the first place, so the stupider members have less competition for resources (this same argument can be easily made for redistributionist policies in general, by the way).

Sure, this is complicated by the fact that financial/material success and odds of reproduction are inversely correlated- and the dysgenic effect of that might very well cancel out the eugenic effect the above should create- but I've never seen anyone seriously try to link the two, much less argue that's a global maximum for everyone involved. (The fact that "just tolerate the bad behavior so that the good ones get ahead enough to spur change" isn't costless, and the fact that yesterday's and today's death cults inherently cannot bring themselves to reward any reproduction, complicate things even further when it comes to whether one should over or under-subscribe to HBD.)

if you treat all a group's members to slightly below their average, it means that any individual with an objectively positive deviation from that average is not rewarded for that as strongly as they would be

this is complicated by the fact that financial/material success and odds of reproduction are inversely correlated- and the dysgenic effect of that might very well cancel out the eugenic effect the above should create

The actual problem with your line of thinking is that the post-Civil Rights level of preferential treatment (disclaimer: I hold that blacks in the US are, ceteris paribus, treated preferentially) did nothing to alleviate black dysgenics which surpassed white rate half a century back already, compounding the ability gap.

Does discrimination exacerbate dysgenics? I could just as well spin the opposite narrative, both in the manner you've suggested and by pointing to generic social-darwinist logic some Philosemitic people use to explain the excellence of Ashkenazim. In any case, the US is roughly a century removed from even beginning to craft policies with natural selection dynamics in mind.

Maybe I just don't understand HBD but does accepting it mean giving up on looking for improvements via culture?

I would hope so. It is often overlooked that conservatives also adhere to the blank slate theory, but they attribute societal issues to factors such as education, families, and perceived laziness, rather than systematic racism allegations as is commonly associated with the Left.

Maybe it would get both sides to shut up, lol.

That's what I was thinking Thomas Sowell's Culture series of books (Race and Culture, Migration and Culture, Conquests and Culture) is a good example of this.

My understanding is that the big thing HBD proponents hope for is that it wouldn't end cultural solutions to inequality, but to change the moral valence of such solutions. It's the difference between "we should implement a societal solution because the playing field is naturally uneven" and "we should implement a societal solution because people are tilting the playing field".

HBD in its modern form can be traced to much-demonized Jensen's 1969 article "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?", which explicitly addressed cultural interventions that are informed by the reality of innate differences, instead of progressive nostrum that is throwing ever more money and white guilt at the problem and political power to their feet.

I have suggested one additional hy­ pothesis concerning the developmental rates of Level I and Level II abilities in lower and middle SES groups, as depicted in Figure 20. Level I abilities are seen as developing rapidly and as having about the same course of development and final level in both lower and middle SES groups. Level II abilities, by contrast, develop slowly at first, attain prominence between four and six years of age, and show an increasing difference between the SES groups with increasing age. This formulation is consistent with the increasing SES differences in mental age on standard IQ tests, which tap mostly Level II ability.

Thus, ordinary IQ tests are not seen as being "unfair” in the sense of yielding inaccurate or invalid measures for the many disadvantaged children who obtain low scores. If they are unfair, it is because they tap only one part of the total spectrum of mental abilities and do not reveal that aspect of mental ability which may be the disadvantaged child’s strongest point— the ability for associative learning.

Since traditional methods of classroom instruction were evolved in populations having a predominantly middle-class pattern of abilities, they put great emphasis on cognitive learning rather than associative learning. And in the post-Sputnik era, education has seen an increased emphasis on cognitive and conceptual learning, much to the disadvantage of many children whose mode of learning is predominantly associative. Many of the basic skills can be learned by various means, and an educational system that puts inordinate emphasis on only one mode or style of learning will obtain meager results from the children who do not fit this pattern. At present, I believe that the educational system— even as it fal­ teringly attempts to help the disadvantaged— operates in such a way as to maxi­ mize the importance of Level II (i.e., intelligence or g) as a source of variance in scholastic performance. Too often, if a child does not learn the school subject matter when taught in a way that depends largely on being average or above average on g, he does not learn at all, so that we find high school students who have failed to learn basic skills which they could easily have learned many years earlier by means that do not depend much on g. It may well be true that many chi­ldren today are confronted in our schools with an educational philosophy and methodology which were mainly shaped in the past, entirely without any roots in these children’s genetic and cultural heritage. The educational system was never allowed to evolve in such a way as to maximize the actual potential for learning that is latent in these children’s patterns of abilities. If a child cannot show that he “understands” the meaning of 1 + 1 = 2 in some abstract, verbal, cognitive sense, he is, in effect, not allowed to go on to learn 2 + 2 = 4. I am reasonably convinced that all the basic scholastic skills can be learned by children with normal Level I learning ability, provided the instructional techniques do not make g (i.e., Level II) the sine qua non of being able to leam. Educational researchers must discover and devise teaching methods that capitalize on existing abilities for the acquisition of those basic skills which students will need in order to get good jobs when they leave school. I believe there will be greater rewards for all concerned if we further explore different types of abilities and modes of learning, and seek to discover how these various abilities can serve the aims of education. This seems more promising than acting as though only one pattern of abilities, emphasizing g, can succeed educationally, and therefore trying to inculcate this one ability pattern in all children.

Part of the problem is that was integrated into the curriculum, as far as I'm aware, just without attribution. Education increases in rote learning and falls in g-loading (and simple IQ requirements), which narrows achievement gaps, technically – at the expense of people with «Level II abilities».

I'm not sure if this happens on the primary school level, though.

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HBD in its modern form can be traced to much-demonized Jensen's 1969 article "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Achievement?"

I'll have to give this a read sometime, thanks.

Part of the problem is that was integrated into the curriculum, as far as I'm aware, just without attribution. Education increases in rote learning and falls in g-loading (and simple IQ requirements), which narrows achievement gaps, technically – at the expense of people with «Level II abilities».

So would the ideal be a two track system which allows for the level I path without removing the option of level II style learning for those who are able for it? I wonder if this is how it works in Italy, I know they divide their highschools into academic, technical and vocational paths.

I think this is what naturally happens in practice with tracking – and in fact Jensen's two-tier conceptualization is too rough.

We just need to extend tracking downward and make it universal.

I mean you could at least get a reasonable cutoff where you can say "we gave this our best shot, no more improvements by throwing acculturation at the problem". Whereas blankslatism demands infinite sacrifices.

Well, the obvious one is that if you acknowledge your weaknesses, you can better address them. For example, we all agree that boys are generally more aggressive than girls, and therefore benefit more from special instruction to control their anger.

As a hypothetical example, lets say you had a race of green people who were biologically adapted to utilization of violence, corporal punishment, and emphasis on the spoken word. If you wanted green people to have better quality-of-life outcomes in a technologically advanced liberal society, you would want to place special emphasis on teaching green children to suppress their emotional intuitions in favor of liberal platitudes. (I.E. Sticks and Stones...)

That is not, in practice, how it works out- New Orleans(but not local) blacks(but not Louisiana whites broadly) are widely viewed as a lost cause even by relative liberals involved in the administration of Houston because of the stereotype of them as green people.

The underappreciated benefits is that: if HBD is true, then "invisible racism that everyone holds" stops being a reasonable explanation for why certain demographics are under-performing. Acknowledging HBD is (in my opinion) critical to reducing racial bitterness that the mainstream media has been trying really hard for the past decade to inflame

American society has a hard time accepting innate inequalities in the first place. Take race out of it. Everyone understands that some people are stronger, smarter, healthier, etc than others. The "best" idea we came up with to deal with it is some variation of, "from each according to ability, to each according to need." Which isn't even that great an idea because it removes motivation from the equation and it means that if someone isn't getting what they need, it's considered the fault of someone who has ability but isn't chipping in out of greed.

Our second best idea is just to ignore it and pretend that success is a matter of virtue. A lot of our fables expound on the virtue of being smart, crafty, etc. But if intelligence is also just a matter of luck, where does that leave us? What virtues can we improve through culture/external forces and to what extent? What ideals do we want children to strive for which they can realistically improve on?

The thing that I would like to see as a society is intelligence being decoupled from morality. We seem to treat intelligence as something achieved through hard work and stupidity as a moral failing. While intelligent people often also work hard for success, many intelligent people are able to get by with less effort than someone with moderate intelligence. We need to decouple the idea that intelligence is equivalent to diligence or that stupid people "deserve" to be stupid.

This does not mean that we should expect or wish for equality of outcome between stupid people or smart people. I cannot imagine a society where that would work or even be desirable. There will always be high-consequence roles where you want the smartest person in charge, intelligence will always have an advantage in competition, and tying compensation with outcomes appears to lead to the best outcomes.

That said, I think our society has removed a lot of guardrails for stupid people while also adding a bunch of extra unnecessary pitfalls. Things like going from an extended family model to a nuclear family model to a single parent model has removed a lot of support that stupid people would have benefited from, while also leading to worse educational outcomes for children. Making cheap dopamine devices available to everyone over the age of three creates a time and opportunity sink.

HBD will only become NBD if we can figure this one out first.

Black Americans are not particularly stressed in the first place; and their problems are not explicable by being stressed out, and accordingly worries of liberals about their potential mental anguish as a result of some scientific paradigm change are on weak footing, and might just be projection born out of inability to conceive of other minds generally and engage with black people specifically.

On top of that, Science has shown that

Blacks and Whites tend to base their self-esteem on different domains and that the tendency of Whites to base their self-esteem on the approval of others provides a partial explanation for the Black self-esteem advantage.

In other words, white=cringe, black=based, in a pretty rigorous technical sense.

Accepting HBD as a valid explanation would have the benefit that, at least, such misconceptions would stop being instilled in the consciousness of Americans, generating unproductive guilt and mental disfunction among liberal white women, likely suppressing fertility and driving up antidepressant prescriptions. It would be an interesting focus area for Effective Altruists to explore, should their therapists allow it.

I do wonder if effective altruists are missing cognitive enhancement as a neglected area considering they're concerned with economic growth.

They might be, but the optics for the quick option are bad- amphetamines are generally illegal unless you convince a doctor you require them to function, and unlike weed, it's not something half the population is already using under the table.

It's understood that they're a treatment for mental illness and that doesn't have the same connotations as "now I can focus for 8 hours", and encouraging widespread use honestly might be a bad idea because if that happens you've created (a limited form of the) Deus Ex problem and it's something you might eventually have to take advantage of or else be left behind in work or school... so even if it's found to fuck with you in other ways you functionally won't be able to stop.

Technically speaking, tobacco does this too, but as far as I can tell widespread nicotine use is more anti-anxiety than anything. Still, the greatest human technological achievements were made when smoking among the US population was at an all-time high, so...

I'm a 27 year old kissless virgin. Part of the reason that I'm a kissless virgin may be that I want to find love and lose my virginity to the person I love, rather than have casual sex for the sake of it

My friend says women can tell if someone is a virgin, and that to wash off the figurative virgin smell, I should go have casual sex with women.

Assuming, for the moment, that I can achieve that with ease, is there any evidence that women can tell that a man is a virgin? How would they do so? Is a lack of confidence just being conflated with virginity here?

Is a lack of confidence just being conflated with virginity here?

Yes.

If it helps, what it takes to have confidence is learning how to manipulate people you don't respect. Dating, in other words.

Bro that's absolutely not what dating is. You're not going to have a fulfilling relationship if you're just dating people you don't respect. The trick isn't to respect them less, it's to respect yourself more.

I've been with my partner almost fourteen years now, your concern has been noted.

If you want to be confident dating women, you have to learn to manipulate them in common ways. And when you learn just how common these ways are, it will make you respect the people it works on less. This will not be all women, but it will affect how you view them. LTR with someone you don't respect is a non-starter, I agree. The odds that everyone you date will be worthy of respect drop precipitously with each additional date.

Assuming, for the moment, that I can achieve that with ease, is there any evidence that women can tell that a man is a virgin? How would they do so?

The same way you can tell that someone is inexperienced in any domain I would imagine. But then again, it's not uncommon for sole guys to lose their confidence and go through dry spells where they give off the same vibe.

Exact same people people who shame you for being virgin, still would shame you "gee, he got his first sex at 27". Having sex a few times also isn't a working vaccine.

Less think about what people think of you, and do what you must do.

You're probably a virgin because you didn't try not to be a virgin. You're a long way from high school. I guarantee you, the standards to join the had-sex club are not high. It's nothing you're going to be shamed for except by people who want to shame you for other reasons.

Assuming, for the moment, that I can achieve that with ease, is there any evidence that women can tell that a man is a virgin?

By talking to you? Or by smell, or looking awkward or something? No, that's a trope from fiction. Be at peace.

I mean, if you were interviewing for a particular job, and you had never had any experience performing one of the duties listed in the job description, and the interviewers starting to ask questions of you about that duty or heaven forbid had you try to demonstrate talent, you might expect they'd notice your lack of experience pretty quick?

There's another idea that goes by many different names but one might need to 'demystify' the experience of sex in order to not be awkward when discussing the topic. You can study hard and understand it on an academic level, maybe even practice the mechanics of it, but that's like learning to dance with a mannequin. Or learning to box only against a bag. There are subtleties to handling another whole human being in the mix that can't be conveyed without actually doing it.

Note, I am 1000% NOT saying you should lose virginity for the hell of it.

Perhaps under one version of an ideal universe two virgins who truly love each other can go on a journey of sexual self-discovery together and thus forge a deep bond and comprehensive understanding of each other's preferences.

I DO think that's unrealistic unless you're actively part of a (probably religious) community that actively values and preserves the norms necessary for that to happen.

And, finally, if having sex is indeed a goal of yours (I assume it is) then if you want to have more of it you actually need to develop the ability to seduce a woman consistently, since it turns out most women don't give off "I want to bang you" signals constantly and the guy is going to have to put in enough effort to cross the threshold from "I am mildly attracted to you" to get there.

If you're bad at it, that by itself can be enough to repel a woman's interest. It's not that they're repelled because you're a virgin, you've just got no 'game.'

This is a something that can be practiced, but as a virgin, unless you're planning to practice it by getting a woman right up to the point where she wants sex but then backing down, I don't know how you can get good at it before meeting 'the one.'

Like others say, women can't literally tell if you're a virgin (how could they?), but they can pick up on your 'vibe'. If you are insecure, it will reveal itself in subtle ways when you interact with women, which they can pick up on. Maybe getting laid would let you overcome the "I'm a virgin!" insecurity, in which case, it would indeed help you be more romantically successful. Not through some metaphysical sex magic, but by changing the way you think about yourself.

Also consider that you might have a fear of intimacy. Maybe you don't make romantic moves because you're afriad of what might happen, and justify this as "wanting to find love" and waiting for the "right time", which is a story you can keep telling yourself for years and years.

Models by Mark Manson is probably the best book on this subject.

Given the way virgin is used as an insult on the internet, I think it's the conflation.

It's not quite a motte and Bailey but basically women can tell if a guy is unconfident and unassertive in exactly the way other men can tell. The only difference is other men don't care whereas most women will treat you differently in personal situations because of it.

Obviously nobody can actually tell if a man has had sex or not.

Is a lack of confidence just being conflated with virginity here?

Yes. Or more specifically, not a lack of confidence per se, but the feeling that you are not where you want to be, you are not doing what you want to do, and you are not getting what you want out of life. What most attracts us to people is the feeling that they're doing exactly what they want to do, that they're in flow, slicing reality at the joints. Almost all nonreligious men in our society, and most religious men too unfortunately, want to get laid all the time with any available woman. So if one is a virgin, one is almost certainly not getting what one wants.

That's why sometimes virginity is perceived as a wildly unattractive feature. If you're doing it for religious reasons, then you're getting what you want, that's attractive. If you're doing it for non-religious reasons, no one will ever believe you anyway. You'll probably get a better reception among religious folk, which is where you ought to be looking for a similarly situated virgin bride anyway. {You'll probably have a lot of problems finding a true virgin among the religious anyway unless you're comfortable dating a younger woman.}

I just don't know any virgin women over age 25 who aren't religious, hideously ugly, or deeply unhealthy. Often multiple of those. If you're not looking for a religious woman, and a younger one at that, I don't see a path forward.

If you're not looking for a similarly situated virgin bride who will likely be a virgin for religious reasons, then I think you do have to question what the path looks like to being with the person you love.

I'm an awful degenerate. I don't think I could have seduced my wife if it wasn't for the yeo(wo)man's work other girls put in to to teach me what was what. The first time we were together was electric, and it's all flowed from there, we've been together ever since. Maybe love conquers all and it would have worked out even if I had been rather underwhelming in bed that first time, but maybe not. So when I look at how happy I am with my life and my wife, I think i should send a couple girls thank you cards.

I have no desire for the woman I'm with to be a virgin, but I suppose that I'd rather she not have high standards for sex, because I'm not sure I could satisfy her.

I don't have much to add in response, but I am grateful for every person who's replied to me so far. This is useful input and I appreciate it.

because I'm not sure I could satisfy her.

You absolutely can, and will, if you decide to. The standards for heterosexual men are barely above the floor, you have to limbo under that bar or trip over it to fail. While I hardly have perfect information, I'm perpetually shocked when I hear about what women out there tolerate. While I think your first time can be written off as a loss, and hell I tell any new partner going in that the first time together will probably be mid at best, you are not incapable of being a good lover in all likelihood.

I'm reminded of a (probably apocryphal, but does it matter?) story in how some erotica mag had a writer who wrote really hot stories, all the readers' favorites are from his pen. At some point there's a noticeable drop in quality, noticeable as in "readers note it and start sending in letters inquiring for the reason"; the editor goes to see the writer to ask what's the deal. Turns out the writer has lost his virginity; the stories just got too realistic to be good any more.

is there any evidence that women can tell that a man is a virgin

Unlikely as such, at least not until you get to the part where you are about to not be a virgin anymore. Definitely not by smell. But possibly by behavioral patterns you could be recognized as somebody who doesn't have a lot of romantic experience. Which of course technically not the same as being a virgin, and since at least for a male, literally nothing changes physiologically if you have had sex once, I don't think it is possible to recognize it as such by any means. But lack of experience/confidence definitely can be. I am assuming here you are a male and not a lesbian/bisexual woman, there I couldn't say anything at all.

As for "lose my virginity to the person I love" - I am not sure I am qualified to give advice here, but I'd say I am not sure it's worth it in general. Male virginity is not really prized that high in our culture (underlying reasons are, of course, biological but we turned them into cultural ones). On the other hand, the first attempts at sex, as many describe it, usually are not that great until you gain some experience and know what you're doing. If you're madly in love, it may be a part of an awesome process of self- and mutual discovery. On the other hand, it also may be frustrating and burdensome for both of you, especially if you both don't know what you're doing. It's ultimately your choice but I'd probably suggest not considering your virginity as too much of a gift to your future bride (most women aren't looking for it, unless for religious and similar reasons), and if you feel like having some casual encounters before committing to a more serious relationship - just do it.

As for "lose my virginity to the person I love" - I am not sure I am qualified to give advice here, but I'd say I am not sure it's worth it in general. Male virginity is not really prized that high in our culture (underlying reasons are, of course, biological but we turned them into cultural ones).

The intersubjective element isn't the only concern; there's also the personal issue - of regret.

There's some empirical evidence that males tend to regret the sex they didn't have, while women tend to regret the sex they did have (as you say, we come up with cultural justifications for this). Might want to factor in future regret as a cost of picking the wrong strategy.

I've seen other men in this position say similar things and I really wonder if they're just using a female regret-reduction model (especially when they're also passive - not a good male strategy).

If OP knows himself and regret isn't a potential issue...well then ignore the general tendency. But something worth considering.

Assuming, for the moment, that I can achieve that with ease, is there any evidence that women can tell that a man is a virgin? How would they do so? Is a lack of confidence just being conflated with virginity here?

They aren't smelling your literal virginity. They are sensing your lack of experience with everything that comes before sex. If you were some weird monk that took a new woman home every week, got all the way to the bedroom and then suddenly expelled the thot from your abode, no one would think you were a virgin until you finally got to the fun part and couldn't find where the penis goes.

Have you been actually actively looking for your love? Not just waiting for that divine maiden to cross your path one day? But trying to cross the path of every girl that looks like she might be what you're looking for yourself? Religious people marry young, you're losing time with every passing day.

I am actively looking, but I may not be doing so the right way.

Visit your local Hillel, say you're interested in getting in touch with the tradition, talk to people there. You'll probably get some guidance and maybe even a match. I'm not kidding, I've seen it happen.

For fuck's sake, you have a hereditary subscription to a superintelligent support network for autistic nerds, might as well use it once.

I'm not religious and I do not have the ability to support, nor any desire to have children. But I see your point.

Wait, can I visit a Hillel if I'm not in school?

So the root cause and "purpose" of homosexuality is still something that is debated all over the Internet on various forums. Some think it's parasites while others think it's to do with the genetic birth order.

Allow me to ramble thoughts that have nlgone through no epistemic rigor whatsoever.

I feel like homosexuality is correlated with a lack of thirst of competition. Homosexuals like to win but they want to win without a struggle. It seems to me that non-gay men LOVE to be engaged in competition.

Whether it's them participating themselves or choosing a side of people who are participating. I feel like non-gay men like the back and forth between opponents ALMOST as much as winning. When I say "like" I don't mean with a smile on their face but they have a somewhat weird tolerance for the ups and downs that come with rigid competition rather than trying to figure out a way to end the whole thing once and for all.

It would explain why gay men are found in careers that don't necessarily have the strictest of win conditions. (Fashion). This rigid competition only appeals to non gay men. Would also explain the gay men's lack of interest in sports.

I'm aware there is quite a correlation between testosterone and how competitive a man is, but there are gay men with extremely high testosterone (thick beards, thick body hair, lots of muscle mass, aggressivell, violent) but still don't necessarily enjoy competition the way non gay men do. I wonder if the thirst for competition is asomewhat separate variable by itself.

Interestingly enough the most prominent gay business man in the world (Peter Thiel) wrote a book called "Competition is for losers".

Sorry for bad English I'm not a native speaker.

Or, possibly the entire structure of male competitiveness is for the benefit of women, and when you aren't sexually attracted to women, there is less need for competition.

All that said, this seems very anecdotal. I'd be interested in rates of amateur sporting participation by demographic. I'd expect lesbians to have higher participation than straight women, and gay men less than straight men, but who knows? And are gay men more competitive than gay women?

It seems to me that non-gay men LOVE to be engaged in competition.

Their choice is to engage or drop out. There is no straight equivalent to Grindr.

I don't get your point. The hetero men also often play chess or some other obscure competitions which don't make them laid, it's appears that hetero men like to compete even if they don't get anything.

I am not convinced gay men are less competitive than straight men outside of pursuing women (obviously). Is there any data on this?

All right, reading this feels like you're kind of pointing to some interesting observations but have come to different conclusions than I have. As a gay man I have complicated feelings about the matter but let me try to unpack some of your points from my perspective. This is going to be really long and informed by a ton of personal anecdotes combined with pop psychology that I literally just made up from my own experiences, so if anyone objects they can feel free to share their experiences instead, but otherwise here goes:

First of all I want premise this with a certain framing that I don't think many people are privy to, even among gay men and certainly not more broadly understood outside of gay circles*. That is to illuminate the dynamic of being a "top" or "bottom." Now, I was misled by this premise for years, believing it only referred to the sexual position of each partner during anal sex: The top puts his penis in the bottom's rectum. This is the broadly accepted and understood meaning in American mainstream society today. And according to your shiny mainstream LGBTQIA image, the top/bottom dynamic basically ends there.** But outside of that narrow American perspective on homosexuality, these terms are more loosely interpreted: In many languages, the terms for top and bottom are more translatable to "active" vs "passive," (aktiv vs passiv in German) for example. And indeed, at the end of the day, what determines who is the top and who is the bottom in a homosexual relationship has literally nothing to do with self identification as a top or a bottom: this sorts itself out naturally. There will always be one partner who is more dominant and one who is less dominant. Any third party can see this. It is strange and disorienting to see a bigger, stronger, taller guy be bottom to a smaller, weaker, shorter guy. It happens but it is weird. It is basically against the way of nature. Homosexual relationships that last are nearly always ones where the top has legitimate, physical, material claims to being the top over his partner. Gay relationships always fail when the bottom is sick of being the bottom, or he believes the top isn't worthy of being the top anymore, or the top starts doubting his ability to be the top.

From my experience, what I've outlined above is exactly how things play out, constantly, even though no one parses it into plain english the way I have. Basically, all gay men exist on some hierarchy or spectrum, that is sort of opaque to each of us at first, but that always sorts itself out in the realm of sexual play. The more dominant man will always become the top to the more submissive man, regardless of who's trying to put what body part where. Bad gay sex is when a submissive man tries to top a more dominant man. You can put up with being a bottom for a man who deserves it, but to be made a bottom of a man who doesn't deserve it, is horrible and degrading beyond the regular degredation of bottoming for a man who you do respect.

I'm rambling a bit so let me get on to some direct responses to what you've written now that I've gotten my own framing out of the way.

I feel like homosexuality is correlated with a lack of thirst of competition. Homosexuals like to win but they want to win without a struggle. It seems to me that non-gay men LOVE to be engaged in competition.

Here I get to talk about my observations of straight men, which have really enlightened me greatly about myself and about other gay men. Straight men are motivated to reproduce. But evolution has complicated things: It wants the most fit males to reproduce. So straight men must compete for the right to reproduce with women. It is not that straight men "LOVE" to engage in competition, it is that straight men WANT to engage in the competition, and believe themselves worthy of doing so. Now, an anecdote. When I was about 8 or 9 years old, I saw a pornographic film of a man having sex with a woman for the first time, and this video really shocked me. I saw how huge his penis was, compared to my 8 or 9 year old penis, and how his body was so much more mature and fit than mine, and at that moment I was sort of "cucked" out of ever wanting to compete in the sexual arena with women. I thought, there's no way, this dude is obviously way more fit than I am to reproduce so I better just not even try. Having sexual energy in abundance, and mortified that I'd never be able to compete in sexual competition, I began rather to see myself as an object of sexual desire and tried to repress my masculine urges as I was so unconfident with my own ability to compete with them that my ego couldn't bear being rejected as a male. So I was drawn to conceiving of myself as a bottom, to be used as the sexual gratification of other men- because at least then my ego wouldn't be damaged when I tried to compete with other men.

Near the end of my 20s this role began to really grate on me. I was frustrated in love and sex; I would date many older men, who I was drawn to because it was easier for me to respect someone with more experience than my peers. But I didn't respect them particularly at the end of the day because I didn't see them as good enough to satisfyingly top me. So none of those relationships ever went anywhere. But I also dated a handful of men who were my age or a bit younger, and I always dragged them out, never going anywhere with them, and I never understood why until I realized that at the end of the day I wanted to be a top but was worried about rejection from these guys. In these relationships I was basically their top but too scared to actually make a pass at them because I was afraid of being rejected by them. I spent a few years at the end of my 20s not dating anyone, because I was tired of playing the bottom role and hadn't yet realized my desire to play the top role. Finally I did some self reflection and came to the realization that what I wanted was to be respected and play a top role in a relationship and once I got over my fear of being rejected, and accepted that I'm actually valuable and worthy of being someone's top, I've had much much more fulfilling relationships with men and dating is much more gratifying.

In summary, I'm trying to say that straight men perceive themselves as being a good fit for reproduction. They are driven to compete with other men to reproduce. In a way, my ego was too fragile to risk the rejection of women so I decided not to compete with other men for sex with women. It's as though part of my brain thought I should instead, seek the role of the female, and become the object of men's desires.

More directly:

Gay men are afraid of losing more than straight men. Our egos can't bear to be rejected by women so we create a new game within our own minds where we can become the object of affection of other men, who we know are horny so it seems impossible to lose.

I feel like non-gay men like the back and forth between opponents ALMOST as much as winning.

Actually, the most gratifying gay sex you can have, in my experience, is when the bottom is trying to do his best to be the top but the top is always secure in his position and brings up the bottom to his level but they both know who's in charge. Which echoes the back and forth you are describing here. But is this type of gay sex super common? Not really, in my experience. Usually it's the sort of safe sex where the top and bottom agree beforehand which position they're taking, and then they just do that, without any play or experimentation. It's better when the bottom can try to push the limits of the top, and the top is secure enough to be like, yeah dude you like that and play into it, while maintaining his status as a top. If a bottom tries to top the top and wins, it's gross and bad because the top has been degraded and the bottom feels bad about it too.

The point I'm trying to make here is that gay men probably aren't really predisposed to this sort of back and forth competition, but it is very gratifying when it happens in a good way where both partners are secure and enjoying themselves. Does straight sex have a similar dynamic? I'm curious to know.

It would explain why gay men are found in careers that don't necessarily have the strictest of win conditions. (Fashion).

I have a degree in fashion design and I don’t know what you mean by this. The fashion industry is extremely competitive.

"Competition is for losers"

At the end of the day, the barrier for gay sex is so insanely low that any “competition” that happens is purely elective. Like, as long as you aren’t aiming to top a guy way above you on the totem pole, i.e. your expectations aren’t totally unrealistic, you can get laid with little to no pushback from your partner. So if you’re competing as a gay man, it’s either because you’ve realized that it can be fun, or it’s because you’re a loser trying to top someone way out of your league. So I can see where Peter Thiel is coming from with that book title, but the underlying logic isn’t the same for straight men.

*Though sometimes I wonder if some Ayn Randian type cynical old women could sus out the top-bottom dynamic as I've laid it out in this post. I'd love to hear more straight people's takes on homosexuality as the echo chamber of gays talking about gays can really leave me feeling insane.

**I believe this is meant to empower people who play the bottom role in homosexual relationships. I personally find this role degrading for long term situations but pointing that out is extremely unpopular politically and risks the entire scheme of homosexuality imploding on itself, if every bottom decided to see their role as degrading, so I guess it's really best if all the tops just shut up and act like it's not degrading to be playing second fiddle to a fellow full grown man, but I digress.

For anyone arriving here from the Quality Contributions thread, please know that a lot of this post is wrong.

The writer has distilled three different concepts into just two, and incorrectly described those two. The three concepts are:

  • Position (top/bottom/vers/side)

  • Activeness/Passiveness

  • Dom/Sub

Position describes only the non-literal position when having sex: the insertive partner, the receptive partner, either, or neither. Note that it does not describe who is physically on top or physically on the bottom. I acknowledge that this is an American-centric view; I will address this below.

Activeness/Passiveness describes who is really doing the work when having sex. It's almost definitely the person who is physically on top just due to physical constraints.

Dom/Sub describes power play. This is a kink which is not particularly abnormal but still not common in gay sex, just like straight sex. Dom/Sub play may not involve actual sex but rather other acts.

There is some shorthand lingo that you have probably heard that hits more than one of these categories. "Power bottom" is one such word: a bottom who likes being the active partner.

The three categories described above are separate for a reason. Power bottoms exist (and are common!). Subby tops exist. The reality is that some people just really like or really dislike receiving anal sex and that is apparently very separate from how active they like to be in the bedroom. It is also different from how much control they like to have in a dom/sub scenario.

Specific things that the parent commenter got wrong:

In many languages, the terms for top and bottom are more translatable to "active" vs "passive," (aktiv vs passiv in German) for example.

The fact that some languages do not have enough nuance to accurately describe sexual relations does not imply that sexual relations lack that nuance. It is inevitable that those languages will eventually develop that nuance if they haven't already.

It is strange and disorienting to see a bigger, stronger, taller guy be bottom to a smaller, weaker, shorter guy. It happens but it is weird.

The disorientation described here is not universal. In countries where gay people are well accepted like the United States, Canada, and the U.K., big masculine bottoms are very common as are tiny twinky tops. There is almost no correlation between sex position and body type. As a result, no one assumes position based on the size of the person. You have to ask. This is why "position" is a field most people fill in on Grindr and a defacto behavior has developed on Hinge where many men set their gender on Hinge to (for example) "Man↗️" to let people know they're a vers/top (in this example).

(continuing) It is basically against the way of nature.

This sentence alone should pique everyone's BS-meter.

Homosexual relationships that last are nearly always ones where the top has legitimate, physical, material claims to being the top over his partner. Gay relationships always fail when the bottom is sick of being the bottom, or he believes the top isn't worthy of being the top anymore, or the top starts doubting his ability to be the top.

This is absurd. Gay relationships succeed or fail for the same reasons as straight relationships: communication, trust, mutual respect, mutual interests, ect. Tops don't get to be tops because they are "worthy", they get to be tops because they enjoy topping, the same as for straight people. The rare case of two tops dating is trivially solved by having an open relationship.

to be made a bottom of a man who doesn't deserve it, is horrible and degrading beyond the regular degradation of bottoming for a man who you do respect

Ultimately this sentence is the perfect encapsulation of the problem with the post. The writer feels that bottoming is degrading. In gay-accepting society, it isn't degrading at all. A person with the mindset that bottoming is degrading is not going to have an open mind toward accepting that people fall outside of this framing. If we want to have a discussion about culture in predominantly Muslim countries then we can do that but it is inevitable that gay relations there will trend toward using the nuance with the three categories I described above. People used to not know that homosexuality was a separate concept from transgenderism. But now we do. Societies tend toward more nuance.

Gay men are afraid of losing more than straight men. Our egos can't bear to be rejected by women so we create a new game within our own minds where we can become the object of affection of other men, who we know are horny so it seems impossible to lose.

We're teetering on the edge of an impolite discussion about mental health so I'm just going to stop here; I don't think it would be necessary or helpful to keep piling on.

Please just be careful about who you trust and what you believe on the Internet. The parent post sounds insightful but it's really just deep insecurity colored by experiences specific to one moment in time in one geographic region. I hope that the pseudo-insight isn't what led to this being listed as a Quality Contribution.

Does straight sex have a similar dynamic? I'm curious to know.

Don't worry, all sex is gay sex. (There was a post making this point for marriage a while ago; I can't find it, but I assert the same dynamics are at play here- there's nothing inherently valuable about roles aside from the fact they solve the 90% case and paper over certain kinds of badness in relationships per the below.)

Every straight sex-haver whose personal values lend themselves to having good sex say it is; I'm pretty sure this is universal across not only any and all types of sex, but all relationships in general. (Interestingly, all of the "I'm glad I lost my virginity at 12-14 to someone much older" that comes from certain gay celebrities appear to be pointing at this; I very much doubt they'd be singing the same tune if the sex was bad. People are usually too distracted by object-level details to notice this, though.)

but the top is always secure in his position and brings up the bottom to his level but they both know who's in charge

In my experience it also takes a certain kind of person to be able to do this in the first place: either you have it, and any sex you have is going to be good... or you don't, and it's bad (and you have to paper over its badness with drugs, kinks?, money, social/personal obligation, etc.). "Lie back and think of England" and "give seldom, and above all, give grudgingly" are memes for a reason... of course, the one that good people tend to have good sex is also such a meme and it's still possible to have bad sex if you're either bad at it, or your whole... person thing falls apart as soon as you see the hole of goals.

It's probably also the case that not all people that can trigger the relationship-glue behaviors; you have to actually manage to inherently like them rather than just wanting them for their whatever-it-is.

I once met an older man who didn't quite have it right: he really wanted to be this in talk, but he just wasn't in action. That relationship developed the same fault lines that you can see in some straight relationships; the girl/bottom really doesn't want to commit but doesn't communicate that clearly, the guy/top pours more material into the relationship and ends up resenting the girl/bottom for it, the girl/bottom feels obligated to put out and the sex is bad, and the cycle continues until something permanently breaks it. Of course, it wasn't a relationship I went into with that goal, but maybe the fact I'm capable of tolerating that suggests I'm not straight enough to properly answer this question.

(As an aside, it's weird that nobody actually talks about relationship failure modes... maybe they do, and I just don't notice it, but most people don't think about this either because it came naturally to them in an environment that wasn't "top bad"- most people 40+ had this, but anyone younger very much did not, because they can benefit from it, or just don't/can't think about it as hard in general.)

Finally I did some self reflection and came to the realization that what I wanted was to be respected and play a top role in a relationship and once I got over my fear of being rejected, and accepted that I'm actually valuable and worthy of being someone's top

This also mimics straight-top (male) personal progress. This takes longer when the social conditions are literally just "top bad".

I personally find this role degrading for long term situations but pointing that out is extremely unpopular politically and risks the entire scheme of homosexuality imploding on itself, if every bottom decided to see their role as degrading

Yes; you're absolutely right- it would destroy the entire scheme of homosexuality in the exact same way, and for the same reasons, that feminism-as-expression-of-"man-bad" destroyed heterosexuality.

Great post, it's interesting to hear many of my observations validated from a heterosexual perspective. I've been trying to unpick the dynamics of straight relationships and how it mimicks or differs from gay ones so your post has given me much to consider.

In my experience it also takes a certain kind of person to be able to do this in the first place: either you have it, and any sex you have is going to be good... or you don't, and it's bad

True but I think it's a skill you can learn and develop over time. I definitely have it a lot more now than I did 10 years ago. I'd say it's on a scale, and some people have it a lot and others have it a little, and the more of it there is in a relationship the better it will be.

This also mimics straight-top (male) personal progress. This takes longer when the social conditions are literally just "top bad".

FWIW I encountered tons of "masc bad" messaging from fellow gays (especially on tumblr from around 2010 to 2016) that was really toxic and a similar impediment to straight-top personal progress as feminism is to them, I would imagine

Yes; you're absolutely right- it would destroy the entire scheme of homosexuality in the exact same way, and for the same reasons, that feminism-as-expression-of-"man-bad" destroyed heterosexuality.

This is a really interesting point that I hadn't considered before you mentioned it!

When I was about 8 or 9 years old, I saw a pornographic film of a man having sex with a woman for the first time

Straight men generally have a 'natural' and strong desire to have sex with women that's omnipresent. An attractive, clothed woman on the street draws your gaze - so does a beach pic on instagram. If a 'straight' 8 or 9 year old had that experience - taking most of what you wrote as true, even if it made them bi, and even if it made them afraid of approaching women, I can't see that eliminating the base attraction to women. She jogs by in 'workout clothes', your head turns. But the gay men I know don't report any such desires, and their heads turn at cute guys instead.

Yeah. Before I saw that pornographic film I'm referring to, I had looked at Playboy magazine and other softcore porn of nude women and masturbated to them, and did not imagine myself attracted to men in a sexual way. But after seeing that film, and seeing other films with nude men, I knew the feeling I had toward men was much stronger than the feelings I had toward women previously. In another universe, where I wasn't exposed to grown men in porn at such a young age, would I have grown up to be straight? I'm not sure, maybe. But at the same time, I remember I was infatuated with a boy in my first grade class who I would talk about so often that my dad got sick of hearing about him, so maybe I was just always wired to be gay from the beginning and my experiences just revealed my homosexuality to me, rather than causing a homosexual attraction to begin. I have no idea.

But the gay men I know don't report any such desires

This is what I'm trying to elucidate somehow (though it remains mostly opaque to me): the mechanism by which I as a gay man do not feel desire toward women. It seems like it's a matter of personal ego: that I can't imagine them liking me, so to imagine me trying to get them to like me back bruises my ego in such a bad way that I have no desire to pursue them. My brain seems to think of men as more receptive to love and able to reciprocate my feelings so while I do get worried about rejection from men, the thought of being rejected by men doesn't keep me from still trying to pursue them.

What do you think of this article?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/05/the-kingdom-in-the-closet/305774/

tl;dr "All" gay people in Saudi Arabia are bottoms and act effeminately, and they pick up straight men to penetrate them in hook ups. And from other research I've done, outside of the modern west and outside of situations where there are just absolutely no women around anywhere for extended periods, most homosexual relations are like this. Bottoms don't want to be tops, and tops are only doing it because it's harder to find a woman to hook up with.

Do you have any sexual desire for women? Does seeing a conventional attractive naked woman do anything for you?

That's a great article, thanks for linking to it. Actually, homosexuality in the Middle East and Islamic cultures (and Greece) has been really interesting to me and something that I've been trying to demystify for myself and that has informed a lot of my viewpoint above.

For context, I'm a white American but I've spent a small amount of time in Greece, Turkey and the UAE. So by no means am I an expert, but during my travels I have dated and interacted with men and have had some really interesting experiences. The messaging we hear in the west, over and over, is that the Middle East is extremely homophobic, that they stone gays, throw them off buildings etc.. But in my experience, men in Islamic cultures are even more predisposed to homosexual behaviors than men in America or Europe are. I believe it's a combination of men from the Middle East being more egoic and drawn to gratifying their ego in a more shameless way than we are raised to do in the West*, and the natural consequences of a highly gender segregated society where the rules around heterosexual sex are very strict. As you've gestured at, it seems that a sort of makeshift "prison sexuality" abounds in the Middle East. And it is overt: in one instance, my cab driver was hitting on me, he was not shy at all; I refused his come ons because it was weird even though I did find him hot. I went to a restaurant and the guy I sat next to gave me his number and halfway through our meal his friend showed up who was definitely a homosexual, and there are entire areas of Dubai where 95% of the people you see on the street are men. Indeed, I've been all over the world and never experienced more men hitting on me randomly than in the Middle East. I can only imagine that homosexual behavior abounds in these areas, but to identify as homosexual is where people in the ME/Islamic cultures draw the line.

tl;dr "All" gay people in Saudi Arabia are bottoms and act effeminately, and they pick up straight men to penetrate them in hook ups.

That's not exactly how I would characterize the gist of the article. The conclusion I drew was that basically, gay identity is a western/globalist import, and the identification of an individual as a homosexual, itself, is what people object to in these cultures: whereas the pre-globalist position in the Middle East is that you're just a regular person like everybody else who happens to have same sex habits sometimes. And frankly I think this position is so much more relatable to my experience. I'm not gay because I was just born this way, I'm gay because I looked at straight sex, and couldn't conceive myself as having sex with a woman, but I can't escape the allure of sex so I am drawn to performing sex in a way that is unaligned with straight sex: basically I want to do the same thing that straight people are doing, but I'm a man attracted to men so it's going to look different. This is all a bad, rambling version of the point Foucault is trying to make when he pointed out that homosexuality changed in Western society from being a thing people did to something that people are, and that Islamic societies are still operating on the earlier "thing people did" version of the concept, and the "thing people are" version was helpful for gays in the west but has unintended consequences for people when they get imported into other cultures.

So: It's not that all gay people in Saudi Arabia are bottoms, and act effeminately, it's that there are certain people in SA who are adopting western/globalist concepts of what homosexuality "is" and "looks like," interacting with the "straight men" who are really just the old school pre-globalist guys who sometimes have homosexual relationships, but that don't identify with a "gay" label.

And from other research I've done, outside of the modern west and outside of situations where there are just absolutely no women around anywhere for extended periods, most homosexual relations are like this.

Yes, precisely. But actually, it also operates like this in "situations [with] absolutely no women around." (not sure if that's what you meant to say?) Indeed, I think the situation is even more pronounced in "prison gay" situations.

Bottoms don't want to be tops, and tops are only doing it because it's harder to find a woman to hook up with.

I suspect that many bottoms do want to be tops but are afraid to try. But it's more complicated than that. I think most guys aren't total tops or total bottoms, I for example prefer being a top especially in LTR situations but at the same time if there's a guy who I think is really hot I really don't mind if he tops me if he's confident and really able to do it well. Tops topping men because they can't find a woman seems plausible as I've stated above.

Do you have any sexual desire for women? Does seeing a conventional attractive naked woman do anything for you?

No. When I was very young I would masturbate to images of naked women but I rather quickly realized my attraction was really only to men. Recently I have gotten in the habit of watching straight porn occasionally, but only when it's bisexual or cuck porn where the male is the focus. I like to see beautiful women for aesthetic reasons outside of porn but I have no desire to pursue them. I could imagine having sex with a woman if I really believed she liked me, but I can only ever see this happening realistically in a desert island situation where there were no men for me to sleep with instead.

*and also, perhaps, a predisposition to homosexuality/pederasty: See Richard Burton's concept of the sotadic zone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton#Sotadic_Zone

Fascinating stuff. A lot of what informs me was reading Different by Frans de Waal, which is a biological look into sexuality/gender and compares the human experience with chimps and bonobos, as well as this excellent page about the science of gender and sexuality. Quoting one part:

To study childhood gender nonconformity, researchers have conducted retrospective studies, which interview large numbers of gay and straight adults about their childhood. UCLA psychologists interviewed gay men, lesbians, straight men and straight women (198 in each group), recruited from the general population; and they found that those adults who remembered playing baseball between the ages of 5–8 included 57% of the straight men, 49% of the lesbians, 28% of the straight women, and 19% of the gay men (Grellert et al., 1982).49 A more recent study looked at how consistently pre-gay boys differ from pre-straight boys in Turkey, Brazil, and Thailand; and researchers here found that pre-gay boys were less likely to be interested in sports and more likely to associate with girls and girls’ activities than pre-straight boys (Cardoso, 2009).50 More ideal (but harder to do) are prospective studies, which begin with children as children and then follow them into adulthood. The best-known study of this kind was done by UCLA psychiatrist Richard Green (1987) between the late 1960s and early 1980s, which included 66 feminine boys and 56 other boys, matched for other variables. Most of the feminine boys would have preferred to have been girls, some even appearing transsexual, while the control group was generally selected (i.e., not necessarily for being “masculine”). Green interviewed the children and their parents during the boys’ childhood and adolescence periods. At the end, he found in the “other” group (the 35 whom he was able to follow to the end) all turned out heterosexual. However, among the 44 markedly effeminate boys (whom he was able to follow to the end), 33 became homosexual or bisexual, and 11 heterosexual. Although some of the feminine boys did turn out to be heterosexual, still in 75 percent of these boys a marked femininity in childhood was a predictor of homosexual or bisexual interest in adulthood.51

All of the homosexuals already being effeminate in childhood strongly makes me think men being exclusively attracted to other men is caused by some early biological process, possibly genetic but likely because of low testosterone during certain stages of pregnancy. There is also research into domestic sheep showing that about 8% of males will exclusively mount other males, they aren't interested in females, and that this may also be caused by a certain brain region not developing properly because of lack of testosterone during a certain stage of pregnancy.

But what you've said has given me a lot to think about. I think it's obvious the full reality of human sexuality is very complex and far from solved.

Does straight sex have a similar dynamic? I'm curious to know.

Power dynamics are weird. Or at least they are to me.

For the longest time I'd assumed that gay men engaged in a pragmatic and egalitarian division of the passive and active roles so that both people get a fair turn. Because in my mind a kind of intuitive equalising game-theoretical situation would develop where neither would be content to get the short end of the stick over and over and would simply leave. I was surprised to find out that the model is wrong, and that, as you confirm, the active and passive roles rarely swap over. I was more surprised to learn that apparently the passive role is predominant among gays. They're not struggling to find someone to fuck, if anything there's a surplus of those, they're struggling to find someone who'll fuck them. (Apparently a similar situation is common in BDSM communities). As a straight man this is an unfamiliar dynamic. The active and passive roles tend to play out naturally in straight sex. I'm often left wondering why a partner is out of breath afterwards when she's put in about 80% less exertion. If I was holding out for a woman who took a physically dynamic role in sex I'd be setting myself up for disappointment. Women's sexual passivity is such a commonly shared assumption that they frequently criticise men for not knowing where the clitoris is while also neglecting that they've got both hands free should they care to look for it themselves. Men however have to be reminded not to touch themselves in situations that aren't even sexual.

I'm not sure that I expected it to be greatly different on account of the inherently active-passive roles but it's still a disappointment when you grow up fantasising about something vaguely "lady in the streets, freak between the sheets" where the woman can match your sexual dynamism and you find out it's more like "passive in the streets and between the sheets". (And then you look around and notice women pathologically attributing their passivity to men, and that this itself is a manifestation of passivity....)

To formative childhood experiences, even when I was very young there was an intuitive specialness to attractive women. Men were background noise. Big powerful man? I suppose it would be good to be someone like that. Small wimpy man? I suppose it would be worse - unless he has an attractive wife. Image of a woman in a flattering outfit? Entrancing. A naked woman? That felt like discovering magic. If I'd seen a full on porno I would have thought the male lead was incredibly enviable rather than psychologically threatening, you know, if I'd thought of him at all. Reframing the social dynamic as one where you give up and compete with the woman to win the man is incomprehensibly gay. Horny straight men know that horny gay men exist. We know that Grindr exists. Some of us even know that the gay men who exist are keener to get dicked than do the dicking, and that there's a common gay fantasy for seducing straight men. We prefer getting rejected by women.

Getting back to competition informing orientation, the flip side of competition isn't limited to withdrawal. There's also cooperation. I lost 90% of interest in competition just as I hit puberty because that age was when sports stopped being a cooperative activity to generate the most fun and became a narrow contest solely to make number go higher than opponent, which as I saw it sucked all the fun out. And to be clear this wasn't a rationalisation to deal with being bad at sport, I was consistently among the first picks for any team sports and chose to drop out of playing for the school team. While I lost interest in conscious competition I still developed a typical pubescent boy's interest in women. I went and found the fun in drugs and music instead, and the sexual interest was (un?)satisfied with porn. I would have been better served if I'd had it explained to me that I could have competed against myself to achieve objective improvements and crucially that those improvements would in turn have afforded me better opportunities in the realm of sex and dating. Sadly/gladly I was in my late 20s when PUA evo-psych gave me a model that explained the world in a way that better mapped to reality than the blend of romantic stories and latent cultural feminism I'd been brought up with (women don't like arseholes, The One exists, be a modern man, it will happen if it's meant to be, etc).

For the longest time I'd assumed that gay men engaged in a pragmatic and egalitarian division of the passive and active roles so that both people get a fair turn.

There are gay relationships where they trade roles sometimes, but it's kind of just a nice thing for the top to do, or something to add excitement to the relationship, but you have to maintain the power dynamic at the end of the day or the relationship is going to fall apart.

I was more surprised to learn that apparently the passive role is predominant among gays.

I would say it depends on who you are and where you are. If you're 6'2 and 300 lb of muscle, everyone's going to look like a bottom to you, and you're going to look like a top to them. It would be degrading to you to be topped by 95% of the guys you meet. But if you're 5'2 120 lb and fem, trying to top, 95% of the guys you meet will be unwilling to be topped by you. Most guys fall in the middle, and younger guys tend to be more bottom and older guys tend to be more top. I don't think it's true that there are always more bottoms than tops, but it may be true that there are more men who see themselves as bottoms or are afraid to top.

Reframing the social dynamic as one where you give up and compete with the woman to win the man is incomprehensibly gay.

This made me laugh. Yeah, I know, I guess I'm trying to elucidate the more base situation that informs my homosexuality versus any straight man, and the best I can do is point to the fact that I'm afraid to compete with men for female attention so I want to compete with women for male attention instead

Since this has gotten AAQC'd, I'd caution that while it's a very fun kink, it's not universal, and even for the people with the kink it's not constant. There definitely are people who see top/bottom solely through dominance hierarchies (and, I'll admit that 'dude who wins bet/wrestling/game/has a bigger dick tops today' has an appeal personally), but there's also vers pairs where people trade off who 'has' to top this time, and power bottoms, and ultra masc tops with role reversal kinks, and other kinks that don't really fit into it (eg, I've also got a liking the punchline 'this ain't a rollercoaster), and I know of some of those sets who are pretty happy with their relationships and sex lives. And there's other people who just prefer frottage, exchanging oral, whatever.

((And then there's people who'd prefer to sub but can't bottom for anal over medical reasons or just don't get as much stimulus from it; prostate and anal stimulation doesn't work the same for everybody.))

It's certainly common, and in some demographics and environments a wide majority. And there's some physical reasons (not that dissimilar from the straight version!) that make it more tiring and more difficult to do all the moving while bottoming. But at the same time, it's not so universal a law of nature that you should be surprised by examples outside of its case.

I think your later comments go into this a bit, but

Though sometimes I wonder if some Ayn Randian type cynical old women could sus out the top-bottom dynamic as I've laid it out in this post.

It's probably the majority take among fujoshi; I don't think it takes a lot of cynicism or age.

In the furry fandom, Maririn's probably the best-known (out, cis) female artist that focuses on M/M stuff and has a lot of comics available, but Rukis Croax does a lot of (good) writing, both porny and otherwise, and it's not accidental there. In fandom circles, it's common enough that when tvtropes talks about modifying character heights to fit the stereotypes, they're really not exaggerating. For more 'conventional' gay-porn-by-women, Iron Spike's Smut Peddler stuff favors it at length, though I don't think exclusively. Sometimes that reflects the sorta gay guys that they're working with (or selling to), but there's a not-entirely-unfair criticism that it's often a way for the bottom to feel more resonant to a lady who's reading or writing along with Mr. Hitachi.

Which probably says a bit about what extent het relationships have some overlap. The "girl looks for guy at least six inches taller than her, who's a breadwinner and physically strong and sexually forward and who she feels is worth letting dominate her" is absolutely a trope. I'd give the same caveats -- it's not the only approach -- but it's very much the mass market fantasy.

I believe this is meant to empower people who play the bottom role in homosexual relationships. I personally find this role degrading for long term situations but pointing that out is extremely unpopular politically and risks the entire scheme of homosexuality imploding on itself, if every bottom decided to see their role as degrading, so I guess it's really best if all the tops just shut up and act like it's not degrading to be playing second fiddle to a fellow full grown man, but I digress.

To an extent, but "submissive and breedable" as an joking-not-joking insult is pretty common, and 'everyone' knows what it's implying. There's nothing about losing a fair competition that has to be degrading. And there's a lot of people find being pleasantly beaten as part of the point, in ways where 'bottom-as-breedable' would be a lot more fun than... uh, a lot of the prep work.

I think it's more that it is useful to distinguish between someone that wants to get dominated, and those who want a 'free prostate example', even if in practice there's a pretty wide amount of overlap. But there's a lot of reasons to not want to air that laundry in front of the hets.

It's an interesting theory, but I have to question how many gay men you know and thought hard about in the process of writing this. Or rather, probably, how many hot, upper class gay men who live in urban centers. Homosexuality is not experienced as fleeing from competition, but as a constant state of competition. If one becomes gay to escape heterosexual competition, it is out of the frying pan and into the grindr. Anecdotally and stereotypically, it is gay men who put more effort into their appearance, gay men who are in better shape and less likely to be obese, gay men who are more likely to choose hobbies that partners might like over vagina-drying hobbies like vidya games or arguing on obscure internet forums.

I would also point out that entertainment fields that gay men dominate, fashion and theater, are as or more competitive than fields straight men dominate, athletics and video games. The win conditions may seem less legible to you, but that makes them no less real to those participating. But materially, economically, there is only so much room at the top, and the bottom gets nothing out of it in fashion.

But more importantly, sexually, the vast majority of heterosexual men are monogamists, while gay men are much more likely to be open see also, all studies put it at 4-5% in straight couples and 30-50% in gay male couples. Moreover, two thirds of men are married, while only one out of every ten homosexuals jumped the broom. Monogamy is sexual socialism, polygamy is sexual capitalism. In a monogamous relationship, competition may be fierce initially to get a partner, but after that you have a secure long term partner. If you let yourself go, if you stop romancing your spouse, if you form unattractive habits; then social shame and government policies act to keep the couple together, or at least to make it inconvenient to exit. In a polygamous relationship, you are an at-will employee. You never stop competing, if you ever lose your edge, you'll lose your spot to a fresh applicant. The rewards scale differently. In a monogamous relationship, however hot I get the reward is the same. In a polygamous relationship, the hotter I am the more sexual partners I can have.

So I guess I just don't see it, in terms of how gay and straight men actually live their lives and fuck. As I get older and I interact with more people I actually find that homosexuality confuses me more and more. When I was a kid and it was just a political issue, and I knew perhaps a half dozen gay men, it was easy to buy into simple explanations like genetics or "helper-in-the-nest" or hormone wash (or, for that matter, sin). Now, with experience, no explanation on offer really satisfies me. The epicycles-type mental explanation I'm working through is that what we bunch under the heading "homosexuality" is actually a big pile of different phenomena from diverse causes, but that's probably just a lack of understanding rather than a sophisticated understanding.

The epicycles-type mental explanation I'm working through is that what we bunch under the heading "homosexuality" is actually a big pile of different phenomena from diverse causes, but that's probably just a lack of understanding rather than a sophisticated understanding.

Where can I read more about this?

I wrote a prior comment in an SSS here. In general, just read all the comments on here, and think of all the different activities we put under the heading "homosexuality" and figure that maybe the act of men having sex with men might have multiple causes. Dudes might fuck dudes for different reasons at different times in different places. Trying to come up with a single cause of all those things is like conflating wage theft, embezzlement of corporate funds, armed robbery, burglary, running a ponzi scheme, shoplifting at self checkout, lying on your tax return, and creating a false will for a relative, and selling used cars with bullshit "warranties" that don't cover anything; and then looking for a "theft" gene that unites all those disparate kinds of thieves.

Do you believe people here pretend to be smarter than they are?

I've seen many people in The Motte claim something along the lines of "that's basic" as if only high-brow discussions were interesting, or as if they were the arbiters of what's "basic" and what's "advanced", or even as if they completely understood the "basic" notion.

It's almost as if the opposite of bike-shedding was sought: everyone claims they want to discuss about the plans for a nuclear power plant (very complex), not the bicycle shed materials which are way too simple.

So everyone who aims to discuss about the nuclear power plant plans is rewarded (even if nobody really understands them), and everyone who wants to talk about something everyone can understand is punished (nobody wants to talk about what they can easily understand).

Do you believe people here pretend to be smarter than they are?

no, people here are as smart or smarter than everywhere else, even comparable to physics/math subs . Even smarter than comments on astralcodexten . It's not hyperbole.

no, people here are as smart or smarter than everywhere else

That doesn't prevent one from pretending. A person can be 130 which is way smarter than most people, and yet pretend to be 145.

maybe a little bit . It's hard to tell if someone is pretending to be smart or if they actually write/think a certain way as a natural disposition. With physics/math you cannot really fake it, but with writing the classic method is obfuscation and big words, but plenty of truly smart people write that way too .

In my opinion a good writer is able to explain complex concepts with simple words. Obfuscation is a sign that the person is signaling intelligence rather than truly displaying it--or that he/she is a bad writer.

It sounds like you have a couple questions rolled into one.

Do mottizens want to look smart? Sure, perhaps even more than the average person.

Do mottizens take deceptive actions to achieve this? Probably. I think that's pretty common in general, and status games apply here, too.

Do those actions include dismissing topics which are too low-status? Ohhhh yeah. I can't say how we do compared to the base rate, but it's certainly an appealing choice sometimes.

Now, for the kicker: how often is a dismissal based on complexity? I'm going to argue...not that often. There are a lot of competing reasons to dismiss a topic. It's simple, it's complicated, it's common knowledge, it's not widely known but should stay that way. Status games, strategic reasons, personal distaste--all bubbling under the surface. I don't think perceived complexity takes priority all that often.

I don't think perceived complexity takes priority all that often.

Which article would you bet receives more upvotes? 1) An article which is easily accessible by the general public, treats a simple common topic in a novel way, and has zero references to lesswrong-specific terms. 2) An article which is completely inaccessible to the general public, analyzes a complex topic, has a dozen lesswrong-specific terms, and references 4 lesswrong-like articles.

Genuinely hard to say. I’ve seen both do well and both do poorly.

That’s also not a very controlled comparison. What you need are two articles almost identical but for the lesswrong-bait. I’m not even sure it’s possible to keep two articles similar except have one completely inaccessible.

Fair enough. I think article 1 would be trashed and article 2 praised, but that might be just my experience.

an article is trashed if the author comes off as arrogant and is wrong. The worst combination. It has nothing to do with the simplicity or complexity of the topic.

Which has nothing to do with what we are talking about. And the article being "wrong" is a subjective opinion which might itself be wrong.

here is the most highly voted article in themotte.com's short history: https://www.themotte.org/post/335/six-months-in-the-life-of

What can we make of it? It's authentic, personal, and it shows effort and subject matter expertise. Text posts almost always do better compared to links, too. I think this matters more than smart/dumb, complex/simple, lesswrong references or lack thereof, left/right, etc. Theory-of-the-world articles tend to do way worse, maybe because they come off as pretentious or out of touch. Lesswrong is not as popular as often assumed.

If someone wanted to discuss the inns and outs of basic high-school algebra here I imagine they wouldn't get a great deal of buy-in. There are certain topics (usually around formal logic, math and computer science) that the Motte is drastically overrepresented in demographically. You can probably discuss a lot of very low-level things on a number of different issues that aren't well-known and get more interest.

Essentially quality posts on non-contentious trivial topics are going to be ignored by the community, the same posts on contentious trivial ones (trivial in the sense the majority of people believe they have an answer, largely culture war issues) will be feted, and quality posts on non-contentious topics that the community doesn't understand but has explained to them will likely be considered a standard for a quality contribution.

The world's best explanation on logical equivalencies and truth tables would be almost entirely ignored here, for example. It's a useful topic to understand but the number of people here who don't grok basic formal logic is probably very small.

Essentially quality posts on non-contentious trivial topics are going to be ignored by the community, the same posts on contentious trivial ones (trivial in the sense the majority of people believe they have an answer, largely culture war issues) will be feted

But that hasn't been my experience. The contentious trivial topics I've tried to talk about gather a lot of feedback, they are not ignored at all: they are lambasted.

The world's best explanation on logical equivalencies and truth tables would be almost entirely ignored here, for example. It's a useful topic to understand but the number of people here who don't grok basic formal logic is probably very small.

Yes, but this presumes that there is a formal logic, when in fact there's many formal logics. One user might say question X is trivial, but that's only in classical first-order logic, in other logics it might not be so trivial. See for example this entry in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Classical Logic, I would say it's anything but simple. And of course it has an entire section explaining this isn't the "one right logic", there's many critics and alternatives:

However, as noted, the main meta-theoretic properties of classical, first-order logic lead to expressive limitations of the formal languages and model-theoretic semantics. Key notions, like finitude, countability, minimal closure, natural number, and the like cannot be expressed.

I think it's clearly a fallacy to think that X is trivial because under a particular view (classical first-order logic) it is trivial. Just because something appears trivial doesn't mean that it is.

But that hasn't been my experience. The contentious trivial topics I've tried to talk about gather a lot of feedback, they are not ignored at all: they are lambasted.

Out of curiosity, what are your explanations (I presume you've thought about more than one) for the reception you tend to get in your posts?

I'm sure you've heard the idea that the LessWrong movement is a cult. I'm not going to claim that because I don't know enough about it yet, but it does have a certain feeling of that. I see a lot of self-referencing: many terms are used only within the movement, and many articles refer to other articles within, which in turn refer to other articles. Too many inside jokes.

So for an article to gain top-shelf status it seems it has to use so many inside terms--and preferably inside terms that in turn require inside terms to understand--that only people on the inside could get, not the "normies".

So a "normie" article would just not cut it, regardless of useful the insight, especially if the insight is accesible by anyone (the plebs). I guess elitist is the word.

There's also an element of converse error fallacy (I've seen that a lot): "this seems trivial to me (and I'm rather intelligent), therefore it has to be trivial". But simple does not necessarily mean trivial.

I want to write a whole article about this, but take for example Karl Popper's falsifiability principle: it's exceedingly simple and yet it's anything but inconsequential. I'm pretty sure if the principle hadn't already been laid out, it would have been dismissed in this forum because "it's trivial".

So for an article to gain top-shelf status it seems it has to use so many inside terms--and preferably inside terms that in turn require inside terms to understand--that only people on the inside could get, not the "normies".

So a "normie" article would just not cut it, regardless of useful the insight, especially if the insight is accesible by anyone (the plebs). I guess elitist is the word.

Can this be simply the case that what you're encountering is the intersection between novelty and community preferences?

For example:

  • blog post that satisfies the community's preferences and offers novel insights = much liked.

  • blog post that satisfies the community's preferences but offers no novel insights = mostly ignored.

  • blog post that does not satsify the community's preferences but offers novel insights = sometimes ignored, some times disliked.

  • blog post that does not satisfy the community's preferences and does not offer novel insights = disliked.

Let's take your idea about Karl Popper's falsifiability principle:

  • if you post a description about it on LW, I would imagine it would mostly be ignored. It does not seem to satisfy LW preferences nor is it novel.

  • if you post a description about it on themotte, I would imagine it would be read, but would garner few replies/upvotes. It falls into themotte preferences, but is not novel.

  • if you post an interesting, novel take about it on LW, I would imagine it would mostly be ignored, although you have a chance to hook someone interested in this type of stuff.

  • if you post an interesting, novel take about it on themotte, I would imagine you might get many replies and many upvotes.

  • blog post that does not satisfy the community's preferences and does not offer novel insights = disliked.

There's a difference between not offering novel insight, and not offering novel insight according to the person downvoting.

That's my whole contention.

Let's take your idea about Karl Popper's falsifiability principle:

I said "if the principle hadn't already been laid out", that means it would be novel today. If it were novel today, plenty of people would think that it wasn't novel. People make the assumption that simple concepts cannot be novel, because somebody intelligent surely must have already thought about it. Right?

There is a very basic (heh) solution to this: just ask. Usually people here are very accommodating and are happy to provide simple explanations.

This presumes the people are actually more knowledgeable. If people are generally more knowledgeable than you, then simplifying a complex concept for you is desirable, but what if in a certain case you are more knowledgeable? In those cases simplifying complex concepts is just condescending.

Haven't you encountered one of those cases when you are in fact the one more knowledgeable and people here still act as if they know more than you?

Haven't you encountered one of those cases when you are in fact the one more knowledgeable and people here still act as if they know more than you?

No. As a general rule, people on the motte are more knowledgeable than me on any subject they choose to write about at length. That includes my own area of expertise. It's one of the reasons I come here.

I understand that, but generally implies that there has to be some exceptions.

So everyone who aims to discuss about the nuclear power plant plans is rewarded (even if nobody really understands them), and everyone who wants to talk about something everyone can understand is punished (nobody wants to talk about what they can easily understand).

There's a higher bar for talking about something everyone can understand given the fact that there are far more people able to spot errors. If I wanted to write a post on economic theory I'd expect every mistake I made to be exposed pretty quickly. With more complex or niche stuff the errors are harder to spot, there are fewer people who feel confident enough to call them out, and readers will feel like they're learning something even if they are unable to judge its quality.

Although to defend this place a bit, for people who want to discuss complex issues this place might be one of the few open forums on the internet where they can do so productively.

There's a higher bar for talking about something everyone can understand given the fact that there are far more people able to spot errors. If I wanted to write a post on economic theory I'd expect every mistake I made to be exposed pretty quickly. With more complex or niche stuff the errors are harder to spot, there are fewer people who feel confident enough to call them out, and readers will feel like they're learning something even if they are unable to judge its quality.

errors tend to be be spotted quickly here. There are enough experts of various subjects that the accuracy here is probably better than on reddit.

Good for you man!

Thanks, man, Posted it on a month-old thread thought, don't even know how that happened, I reposted it in the current FFthread.

I don't know a HBD forum where to ask.

How strong are various MAOA alleles associated with criminal offending (chiefly, homicide and violent assault)?

Difference between 3R and 4R seems relatively minor and smaller than IQ~crime association. And there's 2R.

It also appears that a 1.5 repeat allele was discovered in Middle East countries.

Somewhat unrelated notice, the rare good faith answer to mentioning 2R allele I saw on reddit was like that:

"Yes, it's true that %X% are likely to have 2R allele, which increases offending probability, but then %Y% are more likely to have "crime alleles" in other genes, but they don't talk about it as much". I say it because some people think that it's in current environment that alleles "cause crime", but environemnt should be changed. And in a communist utopia prorper environment alleles don't have any effect on crime.

Dumb question: the absorption of a water soluble vitamin is not affected if it’s taken with fat, right?

Unless you're chugging it with a liter of olive oil, I wouldn't expect it to make a difference myself.

Does anyone know of a good overview of the Race and IQ debate for someone who's completely ducked the topic until now and is basically ignorant?

EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone!

Goodness. I know you're a regular, but this phrasing reads like stereotypical bait.

Anyway, I don't have a good answer for you. It strikes me as a topic with little debate: two groups of partisans, neither particularly on the fence. There's not really an avenue to a general audience, either, since the mere mention is so radioactive.

Goodness. I know you're a regular, but this phrasing reads like stereotypical bait.

Because it is.

Oh, the original draft was worse :P. I had a bit about looking for something that simultaneously doesn't shy away from uncomfortable facts but also wasn't overreaching the data. Experience online taught me that...that sort of phrasing leads some people to react badly.

I figured themotte could parse "good".

It strikes me as a topic with little debate

There paradoxically seems to be too much debate - i.e. people getting deep in the weeds in niche spaces in a way that is just daunting to enter for all sorts of reasons - but also not enough debate - i.e. enough that some authority has a good, clear overview I can quickly find on popular spaces that broadly covers the state of play without trying to recruit or manage me.

I figured themotte could parse "good".

If there is one word that I would never in a million years trust anyone in (or adjacent to) the rationalist community to parse, it would be "good"

The facts that need to be explained is a 2012 blog post compiling some of the arguments in favor of gap being at least partially genetic. Of course it is now outdated, I don't follow the subject closely but I know that for instance there are now better admixture studies like this one. But some of the arguments gave me a better sense of why so many researchers in the field consider genetic causes the most parsimonious explanation.

People who are see-no-evil-pilled typically need a quick introduction of why anyone would even think races might have varied intelligence. A quick (outdated by now) copypasta that used to get posted:

The average African-American IQ is 85, compared to the average White IQ of 100. (popocateptl note: one more recent large study in the 00s puts it at 90, but this was contested by another study that showed no change. As far as I know, no large scales studies on this have been done since.)

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstream.pdf

Human intelligence is highly heritable.

http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v16/n10/abs/mp201185a.html

Scientific consensus is that IQ tests are not racially biased.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289608000305

Very poor Whites are comparably intelligent to very wealthy blacks.

http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Privately, intelligence experts hold more hereditarian views than they express in public. (popocateptl note: An anonymous survey from the mid 10s, which I'll see if I can find, polled experts and had on average them privately thinking about 50% of the achievement gap is genetic.)

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1994egalitarianfiction.pdf

Black children raised in White households have similar IQs to black children in black households.

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1977-07996-001

The average African IQ is estimated at 79.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912003741

The white-black gap in SAT scores, a proxy for IQ, is increasing. (popocateptl note: the gap is actually narrowing now, but slowly.)

http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Genes for large brains, linked to high IQ, are common everywhere except Africa.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB115040765329081636

Intelligence has a 40-50% genetic basis.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/10/news/la-heb-genetic-study-intelligence-20110809

IQ scores are the best predictor of success in Western society.

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

IQ is 75% heritable among Whites.

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

And now for refutations. The most common response to the above syllogism is that whites in America have a shared environment. As such, things like twin studies and adoption studies which purport to show IQ as genetic, actually only show that a smart white child adopted by dumb white parents still benefits from a community and culture that cultivates their intelligence. (Systemic Racism).

For the most interesting refutation of a black-white intelligence gap, read the series of articles Chisala Chanda wrote for the Unz Review. A large part of his argument is that modern transplant populations from Africa to the UK and USA, as opposed to the descendants of slaves, do not show an achievement gap with the native populations.

EDIT: I should clarify that I'm not versed in the latest state of the art in this debate -- I made my conclusions about ten years ago now and don't find the topic that interesting, except as an example of ideological constraints causing otherwise rational societies to act in incredibly stupid ways.

There's an old meme that the best way to get help for Linux is not to ask for help on X, but to publish an overly-confident flawed diatribe about how Linux sucks because it can't do X. I suspect Race IQ debates work the same way.

I am skeptical of the race and IQ narrative mostly because Africa has an average IQ so much lower than everyone else. It's fairly easy to come up with just-so stories about Europe and East Asia. But nearly the entire world, including the pure indigenous populations of the Americas, scores notably higher than pure blacks do, on average.

It seems like the answer is as much about "the places where blacks with no European ancestry are to be found are extremely badly run societies with very high rates of child malnutrition and a high parasite load, and this depresses IQ scores. This problem is shared with a few other areas that are not majority black, but purely black populations probably have an average IQ similar to the averages in southeast asia and among native americans, while east asians and most whites underwent selection effects for higher IQ" as it is about genetics. Unless there's some selection effect for all nonafrican populations but not subsaharan africans that I've missed(and before "Ice age", humans were already pretty widely dispersed by then).

To put it another way, it doesn't pass my smell test that every population not considered black scores higher than every population considered black with no white admixture, when neither are monogenetic groups in ways that the entire human race is monogenetic.

The Indigenous populations of the Americans came primarily from Asian populations around 18K years ago who underwent one hell of a trek. Funnily enough, 2 day old Navajo and Japanese babies show similar responses on the cloth over nose cognitive test (near complete docility) which would be extremely abnormal in caucasians. The separation between Africans and every other group is over 50K years. Given the standard theory that we all came out of Africa, it makes intuitive sense for the least cognitively capable members of our species to be the ones that didn't make it elsewhere. The Saharan desert is not exactly tolerant of the unintelligent.

Evidence for the horribly run nature of African societies, or malnutritution and parasite load doesn't exactly counter the validity of the genetic hypothesis. All of these are highly indiscriminate, killing the smart at similar rates to the stupid. You need particular conditions for selection pressures to favour intelligence over the simpler traits they might favour (speed, muscle, and high testosterone for example). Note that these are all areas where Africans excel, with African infants showing greater muscle control at birth than caucasians or asians (but not aboriginals).

I think the second half of your first paragraph has a bunch of issues.

I don't think it logically follows that the smartest would be the ones to leave first, especially in the context of simple, pre-agrarian hunter-gatherer societies. It could very easily be that the ones who left first were the least aggressive, and thus least likely to defend their territory. Inuit folklore mention the Dorset and state that their response to outsiders was simply to flee. I don't see why that wouldn't have been the case during the first human migration from Africa. I'd judge the argument that leaving Africa in the first place is a sign of intelligence to be false. Indeed, I think the low aggression hypothesis is actually more likely, given that there are experts who argue that drought in Africa is what first spurred the out-of-Africa migrations. That's a point in favour of aggressiveness/docility being the distinction between stayers and leavers, as conflict over increasingly scarce resources would have been inevitable.

Also, the first migrations out of Africa were fundamentally different than any that came after, as the original out of Africa population was traveling through areas where there were no Sapiens Sapiens, only Denisovans and Neanderthal. Once the first group leaves and is in the way, it becomes significantly less simple to push them out and then migrate, as you have to go through potentially(probably) hostile societies to do so. The first group to leave was incredibly lucky, and if they had been the second group due to minor changes in inter-tribe politics or random chance, they might never have made it out.

Finally, some parts of Africa are close to the Middle East and some are not. Any group that ended up in Southern Africa simply wasn't going to leave, and that is entirely circumstance and has nothing to do with any of their group characteristics. There's no reason the smartest humans 70,000 years ago couldn't have been denied the opportunity to colonize the world due to their location.

The Sahara was unlikely to have been a barrier to the first humans leaving, either. It has cyclical wet/dry periods, and it seems that a wet period ended ~70,000 years ago, which is right in line with the out-of-Africa migration that led humans into Eurasia and beyond. I find it more intuitive, given this fact, to suggest that the drought and desertification of the Sahara region was the impetus, and that it only became a hurdle for migration after the humans had already left Africa. On top of that, the Sans of Southern Africa have been successfully living in the Kalahari desert for 20,000+ years, despite scoring even lower on IQ tests(55 on average!) than other African groups.

With all that in mind, I find it very unlikely(I'd posit 95% confidence that this is the case) that the intellectual differences between Sub-Saharan Africans and non-African populations are the result of genetic differences that existed before humans migrated out of Africa. Any such differences are probably the result of selection pressures after the fact.

That hypothesis, to be clear, was that high malnutrition rates and poor general sanitation leading to high parasite load take IQ points off of Africans. It's a competing explanation for African underperformance relative to other parts of the world which also produce few nobel prize winners. The explanation isn't evidence against competing hypotheses; I don't think that South Sudan with the social conditions of Holland or Japan would have an IQ of 100, I think it would have an IQ similar to blacks in rich countries(which is itself similar to southeast Asian and native American IQ).

The argument is more "there's probably a world baseline somewhere in the 80's, and black countries limbo under it by being in youtube ads asking for money to save the children rather than for genetic reasons". I'm open to the alternative that blacks just have genetically low IQ's, but I want to see the explanation for a common selection pressure on Indonesians and Irishmen but not Bantus.

And I believe the sahara was not a desert when early man crossed it.

Could you rephrase this? It sounds interesting but reads to me like "I'm skeptical of HBD because every single black country has a low IQ, and every black minority population in other countries also has a low IQ." To me this sounds like pretty good first-glance evidence that the HBD story makes sense, even before you look at the genes themselves. Forgive me if I'm tired and completely misreading you.

[The poorly run dysfunction country] problem is shared with a few other areas that are not majority black

Could you give a few examples? I'm under the impression that the IQ in say, Afghanistan, is quite high despite the institutions in those areas being incredibly dysfunctional forever. (EDIT: Woah, dead wrong alert. Afghanistan looks to be in the mid eighties. This table looks to be sourced to Richard Lynn's work.)

But nearly the entire world, including the pure indigenous populations of the Americas, scores notably higher than pure blacks do, on average. [...] Unless there's some selection effect for all nonafrican populations but not subsaharan africans that I've missed(and before "Ice age", humans were already pretty widely dispersed by then).

I left this out because it's pure speculation, but the "Cold Winter" hypothesis is the one you run into the most. Populations incapabale of planning many months into the future died off any time their migration crossed a temperate climate. For example, this also explains why Mesoamerican civilizations which were also tropical or subtropical have such a high IQ and had sophisticated premodern science and maths. (Their ancestors had to pass through Siberia and over the Bering Strait.)

Populations incapabale of planning many months into the future died off any time their migration crossed a temperate climate.

Did the path taken from africa to europe really pass into 'cold winter' areas? Africa -> the Levant -> Turkey -> Greece ends in europe without passing through any places that even really receive snow. Plus there are temperate climates in Africa. Are there really any climates on the way to Europe from Africa that you couldn't find i.e. in the temperate regions of south africa? If so, why aren't i.e. Zulus as high average IQ as white europeans, considering their ancestors would have had to make similar migrations? And furthermore, 'cold winters' aren't the only source of long famines. Couldn't there be plenty of (and different types of) causes of famines in the tropical parts of africa to encourage selection toward individuals capable of long-term planning?

Did the path taken from africa to europe really pass into 'cold winter' areas? Africa -> the Levant -> Turkey -> Greece ends in europe without passing through any places that even really receive snow.

Europe itself was the cold winter area, leading to a population bottleneck. Pop-sci link.

The more dubious and interesting question would the Middle East and India. It's worth noting though that populations do not move in a linear direction, and those regions have at various points gotten heavy admixture and even outright population replacement from the north -- especially after 3500 BC or so.

If so, why aren't i.e. Zulus as high average IQ as white europeans, considering their ancestors would have had to make similar migrations?

I'm completely ignorant of Zulu history, but I'm not really seeing devastating unsurvivable winters anywhere along the migration path. As for the temperature on the highlands and mountains I'm assuming they would descend for winters like foragers, nomadic farmers, and pastoralists have throughout history. Are there any mountain ranges that would take multiple years to cross to South Africa? How was the ice age in middle Africa, I thought pretty mild?

And furthermore, 'cold winters' aren't the only source of long famines. Couldn't there be plenty of (and different types of) causes of famines in the tropical parts of africa to encourage selection toward individuals capable of long-term planning?

Maybe. I'd be interested in seeing if there was a population bottleneck akin to what happened in Europe above.

Nepal, Guatemala, and Nicaragua are the three non-black countries in the bottom ten in the world by IQ score. All three are desperately poor, badly run countries that plausibly have environmental factors causing loss of IQ points in kids that grow up there. And really 7/10 countries being African sounds not too far off from a sample of 3rd world countries.

The main thrust of my argument is that since non-black is not a monogenetic group, and black isn't either, the pattern of every non-black group outperforming every black group demands an explanation. I'm aware of the cold winter hypothesis, and that's why I included southeast asia- why does the dumbest country in SE Asia(Indonesia) have an average IQ roughly on par with the smartest country in subsaharan Africa(Sudan)? Since we know that childhood malnutrition and parasite burden and all sorts of other things black countries usually do badly on lower IQ, it accords with available evidence to suggest that the average IQ of blacks would be in the eighties if they lived in countries that were as nice as Thailand or the Philippines. To my knowledge, it doesn't require a cold winter to reach either of these countries from Africa, and neither of them has undergone some kind of selection effect for high IQ, and if anything biased sampling probably makes Africa look relatively better than more urbanized SE Asian populations rather than explaining the gap.

To my knowledge, it doesn't require a cold winter to reach either of these countries from Africa

All of these countries had quite dark-skinned populations several thousand of years ago. Then, populations originating from territory of modern China came and largely displaced them, sometimes without a trace of preceeding population. A large fraction of area of modern China was permafrost or under glaciers at some point.

Why do you think Indonesians literally living at equator have such light skin?

A diet based almost entirely on rice would tend to lighten the skin over generations, but the Chinese replacement also makes sense.

In general, it almost never occurs that some recent non-African population had its ancestors follow shortest path from Africa.

Your premise is not sound. Australasian aboriginals are worse off. Poorest Central Asians like the Kyrghizstani are around black level, judging by PISA results. Ditto, it seems, for lower-caste Indians, which is a group bigger than any majority-black nation. Some purely black populations score higher than some non-blacks; Igbos are stereotyped as crafty and big-brained by Africans and they do comprise a big part of those high-performing Nigerians in the Anglosphere. I suspect that Tutsi are smarter than Hutu and indeed pretty smart in general, which is why they eventually suffered a genocide, as it happens. And the lowest results for specific African nations are suspect. Anyway, someone is bound to end up at the bottom of the totem pole.

On the level of rhetoric, it can be said everyone else are overwhelmingly descendants of a single out-of-Africa migration event (hence the popular factoid that there's more "genetic diversity" in Africa than elsewhere). It stands to reason that everyone else might also be close – and different from the left-behind African population – in some important phenotypic traits. Though of course in actuality Africans we talk about are almost 100% Bantu, and thus fairly homogenous.

But yeah, even hardcore hereditarians allow that with continued successes to eliminate causes of deprivation and sickness, along the lines of GiveWell/Gates Foundation, populations that currently report those absurd scores will almost converge with African Americans. E.g. here's Emil Kirkegaard, who himself believes the B-W gap in the US to be 100% genetic, citing the oft-demonized Lynn:

This estimate of the genotypic African IQ as 80 means that the average IQ that Africans would obtain if the environments in which they were raised were the same as those of Europeans would be 80. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa the mean IQ of Africans is approximately 71, so it can be inferred that adverse environmental conditions in sub-Saharan Africa impair the sub-Saharan African IQ by around nine IQ points.

And Emil himself:

As such, we should expect African national IQs to converge to about 80 in the coming decades everything else equal. Ironically, the main factor that could prevent this is the mass emigration of high intelligence Africans into western countries, thus depriving their countries of their elites. This is what we are currently seeing from countries like Nigeria (Igbo elites).

The problem is that the gap may be more than 100% genetic, so to speak. That is, with deliberate interventions to close the gap we can raise individuals from the lower-IQ group above the performance they'd have had, given equal treatment; and on a population level, with humanitarian efforts, we may improve environments of African societies beyond the level they'd be able to sustain on their own, so new South Asian-like averages won't hold if aid program is terminated on account of its success. Still, maintaining optimal African performance would probably be a net moral (and economic) win for humanity.

the popular factoid that there's more "genetic diversity" in Africa than elsewhere

Is that not true?

It's true inasmuch as we literally talk about "genetic diversity" in the context of anthropological research, but implications that people try to smuggle in with these words are false. I'll just quote Cochran again.

On African genetic variation:

Occasionally I hear people talk about Africa’s great genetic variety. It exists: the genetic difference between Bushmen and Bantu is bigger than the difference between Bantu and Finns. A couple of thousand years ago, before the Bantu had arrived in South Africa & mixed with the Bushmen, it was even bigger: looking at ancient DNA from those unmixed Bushmen, looks as if they split off from the rest of the human race at least a quarter of a million years ago. Well before anything that looks like behavioral modernity, by any definition. Half as divergent as Neanderthals.

But the most divergent populations are small. There are fewer than 100,000 Bushmen, on the order of a million Pygmies, around 1000 Hadza. Most people in Africa are Bantu or related populations: next after that are Nilotic peoples.

And the venomously sarcastic Economists and biology:

Naturally, economists know a lot about human biology and evolution, just as civil engineers have to know about the properties of timber, concrete and steel. They have a good grounding in psychometrics, behavioral genetics, and quantitative genetics – how else could they do their job? Populations vary in traits that play key roles in economic activity and growth – in intelligence, asabiya, savings propensity, etc – you have to be aware of that variation, else whole continents would be economic mysteries. In the same way they know that those observed differences are a product of selection – which means economic historians think seriously about psychometric changes over time and their consequences, such as the Industrial Revolution. That kind of analysis helps predict where modern economic institutions can be successfully introduced, and where they cannot. [...]

Deirdre McCloskey has a new book out: Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. I’m sure that there are many good things in it. But McCloskey makes a significant error in talking about genetics.

“Know also a remarkable likelihood in our future. Begin with the sober scientific fact that sub-Saharan Africa has great genetic diversity, at any rate by the standard of the narrow genetic endowment of the ancestors of the rest of us, the small part of of the race of Homo sapiens that left Mother Africa in dribs and drabs after about 70,000 BCE…. Any gene-influenced activity is therefore going to have more African extremes. The naturally tallest people and the naturally shortest people, for example, are in sub-Saharan Africa. The naturally quickest long-distance runners are in East Africa. The best basketball players descend from West Africans. In other words, below the Sahara the top end of the distribution of human abilities – physical and intellectual and artistic – is unusually thick. …

The upshot? Genetic diversity in a rich Africa will yield a crop of geniuses unprecedented in world history. In a century or so the leading scientists and artists in the world will be black – at any rate if the diversity is as large in gene expression and social relevance as it is in, say, height or running ability. ”

So by this argument that the most cold-tolerant Africans must be more cold-tolerant than Eskimos: but they’re not. The most altitude-tolerant Africans must be more altitude-tolerant than Tibetans – but they’re not. McCloskey is thinking that a turn to free markets will make Africa rich, and that will give educational opportunities to Africans now denied them – but a fair-sized mostly-African population already lives in the United States, a population that is already much more prosperous than sub-Saharan Africans. How are they doing? How many geniuses are they producing?

The whole argument is flawed. Overall genetic variation is mostly in neutral loci. By itself it tells you nothing about any particular trait. Europeans do have less overall genetic variation than sub-Saharan Africans (~20% less), but they show more variation in hair color and eye color than Africans.

Essentially every domesticated species has less genetic variation than its wild progenitor. Dogs have less genetic variation than wolves. So, does this mean that the tallest wolf is taller than any dog? No – the tallest Great Danes are taller than any wolf. The heaviest mastiffs are heavier than any wolf. Chihuahua are the smallest. Greyhounds are faster than wolves (by a little). [...]

What matters is the frequency of alleles that influence a trait, not overall genetic diversity. If, for example, the variants that tend to boost educational achievement (some of which were found in the just-released Nature study) were on average less common in sub-Saharan Africans than in Europeans – says 5% less common – Africans would tend to do less well in school. Like they actually do. Now Africa is a big place, and some groups are genetically quite distinct from others. Bushmen are genetically more distant from the Bantu than the Bantu are from Chinese. Some African populations might have experienced selective pressures that were more (or less) favorable for intelligence than others. Is there evidence, either in test scores or cultural accomplishment (better than any test), that some African populations may have smarts comparable with, or better than, people in Switzerland or Holland or Scotland?

TL;DR: Africans do have greater genetic diversity, but "genetic variation is mostly in neutral loci", i.e., greater genetic diversity does not imply greater phenotypic diversity, and even if there is greater variation in one phenotypic trait (e.g. height), this does not imply that there is greater variation in all traits. Correct?

Pretty much. Actually it's four points.

  1. Most of the asserted "genetic diversity" of Africa as a whole is due to peoples from ancient population clusters, which make up less than 1% of African population and are not associated with colloquial "black people". They are anthropological marvels, but frankly they're not the guys anyone is talking about. Related Razib Khan post.

  2. "Genetic diversity" for a given population is overwhelmingly a measure of ancestral population size and diversity of interchangeable variants that have spread by genetic drift. Out-of-Africa populations have passed through a series of severe bottlenecks, so they've shed some genetic markers we can find in African Bantus. Doesn't have much to do with anything consequential. It's like a JPG that's gone through lossy compression: there are color bands now, and less diversity of color patches or raw pixel values, but it doesn't mean the semantics of the image is altered, or that the range of any color channel is diminished, in fact the opposite can be true.

  3. Local adaptation can very quickly act on non-neutral loci, a few thousand years are more than enough to change a typical polygenic trait by 1 SD. We have no grounds to presume that ancestral (>50KYA) diversity explains modern diversity for groups that have evolved in different environments.

  4. By the same logic, yes, traits are independent products of selection. Just like all Sub-Saharan Africans are pretty dark relative to other races, they can be pretty ... fast runners, putting aside their internal ranking and their variation in toxin resistance or deep-diving talents or cricket skills.

Thank you, that was the TDLR of an effortpost I was looking for.

An anonymous survey from the mid 10s, which I'll see if I can find, polled experts and had on average them privately thinking about 50% of the achievement gap is genetic.

You are thinking of the Rindermann survey from 2014, which was the basis for these publications:

Survey of expert opinion on intelligence: Intelligence research, experts' background, controversial issues, and the media

Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence: Causes of International Differences in Cognitive Ability Tests

Prior to that there was the Snyderman survey from 1984:

Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence and Aptitude Testing

Thanks! You've found it.

For the most interesting refutation of a black-white intelligence gap, read the series of articles Chisala Chanda wrote for the Unz Review. A large part of his argument is that modern transplant populations from Africa to the UK and USA, as opposed to the descendants of slaves, do not show an achievement gap with the native populations.

The most obvious refutation of that refutation would be that those populations are highly selected for intelligence. I am sure if someone like me who knows next to nothing about the topic can thing of this caveat, Chanda can think of it too. Does he address it?

Yes, he (why did I think Chisala Chanda was a woman?) does. @popocatepetl elaborates further in a sibling comment.

To tldr Chanda's hypothesis: non-African people (especially Europeans and Asians) have a more restricted (canalized) phenotype, as do women. American Blacks are stupider than African Blacks because they have genetic admixture from low-class Whites. The genes that make Seamus a bit stupid and aggressive make Tyrone very stupid and very aggressive, while Shaneequa won't be affected as much, but her sons will.

There are some studies I can think of that should be able to support or weaken this claim, like:

  • middle-class children of ADOS fathers and White mothers should be smarter and less aggressive than middle-class children of White fathers and ADOS mothers

middle-class children of ADOS fathers and White mothers should be smarter and less aggressive than middle-class children of White fathers and ADOS mothers

I don't see how that follows. Shouldn't our prima facie assumption be that the genetic information that contributes to [aggression and stupidity] is passed on patrilineally as well as matrilineally?

Since females are more canalized and we assume that ADOS genomes are saddled with Borderer alleles, an ADOS male of with a substantial IQ is more likely to have fewer of these alleles than an ADOS female with a similar IQ, since her phenotype is more restricted.

Since we are not restricting the selection to specific low-class groups, a White male and a White female with an equally substantial IQ are much less likely to bear a significant load of the alleles we're trying to avoid, so they should be coming from the ADOS parent if they appear in their offspring.

than an ADOS female with a similar IQ

Why are we comparing similar IQs? If the axiom you mention were true, we would expect to see lower IQ in ADOS men on the left tail of the distribution than in ADOS women on the left tail of the distribution, beyond what would be expected from the Greater Male Variability hypothesis. Is this the case?

Because I'm using different sexes having the same IQ as a proxy for having different genetic load: IQ 100 ADOS men probably have "cleaner" genes than IQ 100 ADOS women. If the children of ADOS women slip further left on the tail, then it's probably true. If the children inherit the same IQ, then it's probably false.

Ah, gotcha. Thanks.

It seems like the obvious issue with that is that African Americans mostly have white admixture that comes from the upper classes(mostly the sons of plantation owners), not the lower classes.

The plantation owners in question were presumably violent rapists, which is how much of the admixture happened in the first place.

Having a mistress literally owned by a close relative looks distinctly non consensual today, but that doesn’t mean that’s how it would have been understood as taboo in societies which accepted owning slaves, at least not in a way which was legibly close to rape.

My understanding is that there was a lot of straight-up rape, i.e., the man physically forcing himself on the woman, who of course couldn't resist because of her status. But admittedly I have no idea how much of the admixture is due to violent rape, how much was "borderline" as you described, and how much was consensual.

The best documented example of miscegenation in the antebellum south was plaçage, which featured very little violent rape but lots of elite males, but 1) slavery in French Louisiana was different and 2) that’s just the best documented example, presumably slave owners who raped their slaves didn’t write it down. So it’s up in the air how much white admixture was due to outright coercion and how much of it was the predictable result of high status males and low status females.

It’s also complicated by the fact that very few writers about slavery in the antebellum south were neutral on the practice- they were either abolitionists who generally picked the worst examples to write about, or apologists who were almost certainly lying.

(why did I think Chisala Chanda was a woman?)

Probably because the suffix -a marks something as feminine in romance languages, and, stop me if I'm wrong, russian.

The most obvious refutation of that refutation would be that those populations are highly selected for intelligence. I am sure if someone like me who knows next to nothing about the topic can thing of this caveat, Chanda can think of it too. Does he address it?

I thought the same thing. Half-way through the series, I recall Chisala citing a black refugee population that settled in California (rather than skllled educated immigrants) where their children achieved average results in school. My assumption is that this example was cherry picked from many hundreds of refugee communities that did poorly, but there it is.

Where in California? East LA or the Central Valley, or someplace where average results aren’t ‘shows up about half the time and can spell own name, with assistance’?

Sorry, it was Seattle rather than California. He was writing about refugees from the Horn of Africa (ethiopians, somalians, oromo), whose children performed above the domestic black average test scores depite not speaking English at home. The results weren't collected for intelligence research but as part of the city government's report on refugee education. Here is the exact part

So, how does one of the lowest IQ scoring groups in Africa, emigrating with the lowest evidence of any selection whatsoever (economically or academically), have their children score above black Americans in one of the highest scoring states for native black Americans, (some) even outscoring Hispanics who are assimilated, before they are even assimilated themselves? How do even the Somalian refugees brought in from a total failed state catastrophe outscore black Americans as soon as they just learn to read some English?

It can certainly not be explained by any of the recent HBD answers, individually or in combination

Thank you! I am very happy to finally see someone earnestly attempting to refute HBD arguments. For completeness' sake, here is an archive of the blog post, the source article and the presentation Chisala got his numbers from.

I remain unconvinced. There is no indication that the Somali sample is in any way representative of the source population. Here is Chisala's argument:

Their performance above American blacks (labeled as “English-speaking” blacks) defies the common sociologist explanation that higher achieving black immigrants are simply the most driven members of their source populations (some were just in refugee camps), and it equally defies the modern hereditarian argument that they are just the most self-selected in intelligence relative to their source populations, unless we now start extending this cognitive self-selectivity and “assortative mating” quality to people who run to United Nations refugee camps for protection. (It is not necessarily all who were from these camps, but that doesn’t matter since even those who were from there are performing above native black Americans).

Chisala seems to assume that most of the Somali sample comes from refugee camps. But the source article only mentions that "[The Somali children's] families came to the U.S. to escape their war-torn country, many by way of refugee camps.". Chisala puts this aside by saying that "It is not necessarily all who were from these camps, but that doesn’t matter since even those who were from there are performing above native black Americans". But I didn't get that from a cursory glance of the data, which only seems to report aggregate data. Even so, there are a whole host of different selection effects with those coming from refugee camps. As one commenter puts it:

In a country like Somalia, getting into a refugee camp may be more desirable than not being in one. And from there to be selected for relocation to America may also be more desirable than not.

As with most desirable things in life, those with a higher IQ or socioeconomic status may be better at working the system to their benefit to get them.

Chisala did, as far as I can see, not respond to this concern.

I have not yet looked at the UK data Chisala mentions.

I'm arguably biased but I think debate overviews are unrealistic. This debate is too vast. At this point, collected rebuttals and pointed papers are the best way to appreciate the state of discourse, as if seeing ocean in a drop of water. So, on top of what you've been already given, a few high-profile samples:

Some anti-HBD:

And some responses:

Collections:

Additionally:

Now that I think about it, not much has changed since 1988 and The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy. Well, we've got confirmations of genetic differences, and there's more censorship, and most of the big guys in the debate died. The scientific question received a political answer.

Europeans and recent cognitive evolution + references

I am unconvinced this should be a source. It seems to need more evidence for it's claims.

Until the eleventh century, mean IQ was relatively low throughout Europe, perhaps hovering in the low 90s.

this is a seemingly baseless claim without use of the Flynn effect. And if it is using the Flynn effect it is using it to undermine the authors own argument as he is saying that people in eleventh century western countries had higher IQ's than the 20th century? I would like to know how this number came to be the low 90's as I haven't yet found it in the sources for the article, nor does it seem to be directly sourced. According to the authors own first source (Oesterdiekhoff 2012) used in the authors next paragraph, "In 1900, no pre-modern or early modern population had a mean IQ above 75," (Oesterdiekhoff 2012, Section 2).

Anyway the authors main idea seems to be that the farmers that took roles as artisans, craftsmen, business men etcetera were higher IQ and would have higher fertility rates and thus their higher IQ offspring would have higher IQ's. There kids would be more numerus and thus outbreed all the poor lower IQ people, a neat and tidy theory.

If this was accurate, why would northern Europe have such high IQ's, people who had been near barbarians for several millennia while say Egyptian artisans were being selected for IQ? I would like to know why he only chooses eleventh century Europe as the starting point, as opposed to any other economy in any other region. Did these jobs not exist in the middle east?

That evolution was driven by the high fertility of those people who knew how to exploit the opportunities of an expanding market economy. Their population growth was so great that they overwhelmed the niches available to them. Many had to find niches farther down the social ladder, with the eventual result that their lineages became predominant even within the lower class (Clark 2009a).

The author begins speaking about the eleventh century but cites Clark to make his argument, who only covers between 1600 to 1850 England and makes no mention of IQ but does mention genes. I think using genes is a dubious reason to explain why in a class based society, the rich upper class were able to be better off or more numerous in future generations then the poor generations. While Clarks claim that rich surnames disappeared at a lower rate than poorer surnames, I think it is important to actually add some numbers to that. From 1600 to 1850, the Poorest had 15% of names extinct, the richest had 8% of names extinct. An interesting read, though I do not like that the author does not address other reasons for poorer people not keeping their last names at the same rich people, however I will not get into that here. Clark does make some good argument that England had more social mobility than given credit for but hurts his argument elsewhere and I don't want this to turn into a review of Clark, just the article.

the very next quote is that of (Seccombe 1992, p. 182). The quote is rather unimportant however the source is as it's review seemingly conflicts with the above Clark quote.

The complex text ranges broadly over a vast stretch of historical change from the Middle Ages to the brink of the Industrial Revolution

When speaking about the transition from feudalism to capitalism

Finally, a vital revolution in family size took place, in which the poor came to have larger families than the rich, and in which patterns of intergenerational mobility reversed

so since the industrial revolution ~1750-1840 IQs have been going down? 1600 to 1750 they go up, 1750 to 2000 they go down? So is the message of the article that we are equivalent to our 1600's selves? I get this is a book synopsis so I don't want to be too harsh as perhaps something is missing, but this seems like picking and choosing when to believe an authors claims and forgetting when they would contradict one another.

This is all pretty fair. I've included it on a whim but looking again it's weak, despite citing interesting literature. Retracted, thanks.

We don't have a solid way to talk about anything like Flynn effect in pre-modernity and pre-testing periods; and how 1900's Europeans would've scored on modern tests is not interesting. Personally I'm on the fence regarding the timeline of the current ranking emerging: there probably has «never» been parity between Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans, but it is plausible that Europeans have been gaining in their advantage in historical time, and so this gap is not explained solely by cold winters or some other factor present for many millenia. On the other hand, cold winters theory seems to explain the pattern of the center of civilization moving up latitudes historically: it's as if building a complex society in the South is playing on easy mode, but then the society hits a limit, and novel technologies flow northward, enabling another round. Today, the most advanced nations in the East and West are indeed populated by people who have passed through the cold winter filter.

My reason for including it was: Breeder's equation, IQ heritability and net fertility differentials allow for meaningful (~0,5 SD) eugenic and dysgenic shifts on the scale of a few centuries, so arguments along the lines of "there wasn't enough time for X" are invalid. It's all speculative until we get good decent IQ PGS for different populations and test that ancient DNA, but I think it's likely that many civilizations have gone through a eugenic phase and subsequent dysgenic collapse, and as you say, Egyptian artisans may have been selected for IQ just like Europeans. This is bog standard cyclical history theory.

I think using genes is a dubious reason to explain why in a class based society, the rich upper class were able to be better off or more numerous in future generations then the poor generations.

Clark, in his oeuvre, demonstrates fertility more directly than by rates of family names going extinct, and his evidence from modern era Japan, China etc. does corroborate that upper classes have innate quality separate from class advantage.

If true this probably imply that concerned ethnic minorities are more likely to responds more potently to nootropics such as e.g. cholinergics. A result I have not yet found through serendipity search, IMO I can't even answer wether women benefit more from nootropics (except for testosterone) but at least it is vastly known people with lower IQ in general, (even more so if specific condition such as fragile X syndrome) and non-young people are much higher responders.

Very interesting list. But isn't it depressing if not much has changed? Shouldn't GWAS studies shown something which can't be handwaved away?

If there's something in the academic debate that can't be handwaved away, that's probably termination of your tenure. I recommend reading this and this.

I apologize for misleading phrasing. People seem to be under the impression that there is some ongoing «debate». No, the debate had been decisively won by the HBD side decades ago, on account of the opposition failing to propose any more parsimonious explanation, even one model of environmental effect that'd be up to snuff and robust to social changes or controls (that wouldn't inherently reduce the genetic component wherever it is present). The best they can do is nitpick here and there and laughably misinterpret some facts, including new facts (my favorite recent example). Admixture studies, GWAS – very cool, but for purposes of the race-IQ controversy, all these fancy new data merely confirm what was known in the 60s.

The political contest has gone the opposite way, however. Now there's an escalating mop-up and gaslighting operation. Scientists know more than ever, but do not care to integrate their knowledge into anything more than affirmation of the prestigious consensus, whereas commoners know less than their grandfathers, and care less about knowing, and flaunt their ignorance and stupidity. In the process of this mental liberation, we are dismantling the vestiges of Enlightenment ideology. Children born today will learn from show trials and grow up to inherit the world where appealing to "facts" or "fairness" or some objective "truth" will be considered inherently cringe, and only the self-affirming tyranny is a legitimate source of knowledge, for it is Based. If you think I'm exaggerating or sound like a crank, you're free to wait and see this hypothesis tested.

In the last week I saw two instances of reddit comments that were unique in phrasing and almost identical. The first was in the same thread shilling some video game streamer, so that's not surprising, but the second was copying a comment from a three year old thread found via other discussions tab in /r/documentaries. Someone brought up a similar situation in a CW thread a few months ago but I don't remember it well. Anyways both comments were later deleted, and I only saved the second account name, a one year old account with only comments in the last week that just did the same^1 thing^2 today and most of its comments are copied from crossposts. Any guesses on the purpose of this?

Bots that copy old Reddit posts or old comments on the same submission have been around for years. There are ones that copy Youtube comments on a video into Reddit submissions of that video too, I remember a /r/videos thread where one of those attracted attention because the Youtube comment mentioned the current year and the Reddit comment copying it was in a different year. The goal is presumably to automatically create large numbers of spam accounts with a human-like history of upvoted comments to get past Reddit's anti-spam measures. The only new thing I'm seeing here is that it looks like they've worked in some program to rephrase the comment, maybe Reddit implemented some measure to detect the direct copies.

Garden variety karma farming? Generating pre-good standing and aged accounts for later sale?

reposting old memes, reposting old links

It's so inefficient at increasing karma I had ruled out that possibility.

Might be a more complex karma farming dynamic? Like most big subs require a minimum karma to post, so getting started might go that way?

It is just karma farming by copying old comments. It's inefficient on a per-comment basis, but it can be automated and done on many accounts at the same time, so it works. It's a very common strategy that's been used by reddit bots for years. Another user noticed something similar a while ago.

I suspect the goal isn't to maximise karma, but generate a reasonable amount to make the account look as if it's owned by a real person.

Copying top comments is obvious and easy to see. Copying mid comments attracts less attention.

Posting only a handful of comments in the last week and taking so long to get to double digit karma is unbelievable too. Unless its behavior changes drastically I don't see how it can be worth selling or scalable as that would definitely attract notice.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are farming bots designed to look as human as possible, including posting at the average rate of a reasonable human. It may not be quite as fast, but it's easy enough to automate, and no reason you couldn't have a single bot run tens of thousands of accounts like this, so you might still get a reasonable number of decent karma accounts after a month or so.

Wait everyone is saying karma farming but why? There is no value to high karma accounts. Once you get above a low minimum threshold to post in a sub, there is no further value to more karma. It doesn't make one's content more discoverable.

There is value if you resell them. Some subs have high but hidden thresholds, especially for comment scores.

How much can you sell them for? What's the threshold? I feel like the threshold is low as is the resale value. It's pretty trivial to get big karma by just posting "orange man bad" level takes on a popular sub.

My parents have a wireless phone charger. Problem is that it basically doesn't work when they have a case on their phones. Is there a solution to this (other than removing their phone case)?

I find the health aspects of radiations through induction charging worrying in principle, I have no idea how the potency compare to WIFI/5G radiation though but I would'nt risk it without studying the topic, it is absolutely not reasonable to trust our broken civilization on health topics, especially hypothetical oxidative and mutagenic long term only observable accelerated ageing.

Physically, it works the same way a transformer works -- induction. When you plug your phone (or computer, etc) into the wall, there is a transformer in the circuit stepping down the voltage. There is no basis to be worried about risks from inductive chargers any more than you worry about risks from transformers. Also this isn't some "new untested science" this is Maxwell's Equations, stuff we've understood since the 1860s.

radiations through induction

They basically do not radiate*. It is a near-field system, not an efficient antenna. Being near-field only means that the field strength drops off powerfully with distance. Sitting at your desk with a wireless charger on it has virtually no H-fields from the charger getting into your body. And those aren't dangerous anyways. There's absolutely no concern here.

*I mean, not more than all other electronics. Every conductor is a weak antenna and the FCC limits farfield emissions of all electronics so they don't cause interference.

Maybe it's just the extra distance caused by the thickness of the case. Does charging work if you take off the case and put a piece of cardboard between the phone and the charger? The inductive coupling only works real close.

Googling, there are wireless charging compatible phone cases.

Other than getting another kind of charger no. Those chargers are horrendously innefective, what little they can charge with all the losses is a miracle.

How does substack moderate itself?

They seem able to walk the fine line where it's a mostly respected outlet yet allowing heterodox views, and while I've heard the occasional handwringer complain, I've not noticed any serious smear campaigns against it, or it having the 10000 witch issues.

Are any writers being cancelled or quietly deboosted?

It's at core not a social media platform. This makes comparisons to Twitter/Reddit and their clones/subgroups somewhat tendentious. There is no really convenient way for a substack post or comment to "go viral" on the platform in the way a tweet or Reddit post will. As of yet, we also haven't seen substacks/comment sections that will rally the troops for raids on other substacks, which is generally the dynamic that leads to witch-covens becoming an issue.

It's just a different animal.

They have a "pass the buck" moderation system.

Substack's monetization is done using Square or Stripe. I don't recall which. I'll say Stripe for the rest of this post for simplicity.

But the important thing is Substack never holds the money. The readers pay the author using Stripe. Stripe takes the money and gives Substack its cut.

If an author ever says anything really bad then Stripe will kill their merchant account. Substack doesn't need to get involved.

As a result Substack doesn't need to hire a bunch of people in SF to police the tone of articles. That means that there's no one to push for quiet moderation like deboosting.

If a bunch of angry activists come at them on Twitter they can just point at Stripe.

There were plenty of smear campaigns against it, they just braved them.

The "7 zillion witches issue" was always mostly fiction, there aren't that many witches. If you can get a reasonable amount of normal people to hang out somewhere, they will be the ones eclipsing the witches, not the other way around. This was (and maybe still is being) done by sponsorship deals for authors with pretty big following (Greenwald, Taibi, deBoer, and lots of others that I don't follow).

Moderation is done on a per-author basis. It's like running your Youtube channel, or subreddit. The only thing I can think of that could have a moderating effect, is that there's something clunky about the website, that discourages high-frequency low-effort posting.

Isn't deBoer a pro-HBD leftist? Closer to witch than "normal people".

When people talk about witches, I tend to picture people who are single-mindedly obsessed with discussing issues that would get them booted from polite society, which is why they scare away the normies, which is why they are supposedly a problem for the formation of non-witchy pro free speech communities. De Boer mostly posts short stories, comments on media, and only every once in while talks about politics. I think I literally never read anything from him about HBD.

It certainly isn't his main topic, but he has posts like this or this that basically say the same thing in slightly different terms. In the first one he is quite clear that he thinks that the inability of education to close achievement gaps is due in large part due to genetics, but he also wishes for that aspect to be worked around and deemphasized.

I know they exist, the entire reason I'm following him is that he's a canceled lefty, so he had to be canceled for something.

My point is that he's not a witch, for that he would have to be obsessed with the subject, to the point he's turning everyone off except for people with similar obsessions.

He accepts that IQ is heritable, he also accepts that average IQ differs between self-identified racial groups, but not that the latter is explained by the former.

Your point is unclear.

WTF you mean? It looks like you're describing mainstream academic anti-HBD where phenotypic IQ differs between racial groups but genotypic IQ is same.

DeBoer elliptically acknowledges the HBD-IQ aspect of reality and then doubles down from a materialist-socialist (real Marxist, not trendy 'Marxist') perspective that he wants from each according to his abilities (HBD-IQ is here) to each according to his needs (not here).

He wrote a book called The Cult of Smart. This book has valuable insights about how charter schools can IQ poach out of normal public schools to make themselves look very impressive.

Does he also propose soon abolishing of capitalism (like classical Marxists do)?

The witch issue is really easy to avoid, too, if you have a credible reason for your platform to be attractive to non-witches. Reddit could have ignored the moderation issue and not had a witch problem, voat couldn’t avoid the witch problem no matter how closely it’s moderated. You see a similar dynamic with twitter- it’s not a witch hive even after moderation was loosened, but mastodon and gab both are, albeit practicing very different kinds of witchcraft.

There were plenty of smear campaigns against it, they just braved them.

Yeah, I think OP may just not remember because it was ineffective but they did the usual "start a drumbeat about how 'concerning' this is". It just didn't work.

Probably because there really wasn't a hook for the average person to get up in arms about; people can pay or not for commentary from people they like. So what?

It came across as jealousy/turf-protection on the part of the mainstream media and Substack obviously had very little incentive to fold to claims that Matthew Yglesias was a witch.

Can anyone recommend any good books about the 20th century overpopulation scare / population control movement?

I've been reading some books that touch on the topic (mostly in terms of its overlap with the eugenics movement), and a thought I can't get out of my head (which maybe I'll turn into a top-level CWR post sometime) is how similar it feels to the climate change movement today. It's largely forgotten today, but from what I can tell, it really penetrated the public consciousness in the 60's and 70's, and it was really treated as a crisis and an imminent existential threat. e.g. Paul Ehrlich predicted in 1970: "In the next 15 years the end will come, and by the end I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity."

One aspect of the comparison I'm interested in teasing out some more is how the movement's opponents were treated. It seems critics of the climate change movement ("denialists") are shunned by the scientific community and vilified in mainstream media. Was it a similar case with overpopulation skeptics during the height of the movement, or was there more space for robust debate? I'd be interested in pointers to any prominent contemporary critics of the movement.

I read Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin a few years ago and while the crux of the book is an examination of what he calls "anti-humanism", the first several chapters discuss the population control movement in about as much detail as you could want without reading some ponderous academic work. It should be noted, though, that Zubrin's areas of expertise are aerospace and nuclear engineering, not history, and he's best known as an advocate for Mars colonization, so take that for what it's worth. The book is pretty good, though, and he does talk about climate change a great deal as being similar to the overpopulation scare. In other words, it seems to be exactly what you're looking for.

I believe some prominent contemporary critics of overpopulation as a crisis would include Malcolm muggeridge and the Roman Catholic Church.

What's the best way to copy long passages from a physical book?

Typing takes forever, so that's out. I've tried Googling a digital copy of the book, but a lot of times the books I read aren't scanned or are in the form of PDFs without copiable text. I usually usethe Google Lens function of my Camera app to grab text using OCR, but it's only about 95% accurate, meaning I often have to go back through and correct a lot of erroneous letters and punctuation. Is there a smarter way to do this?

Type faster.

Been trying since middle school, I'm just a shitty typist.

You might be interested in the approach described in this blog post. TL;DR take a first pass with OCR and then pass it through GPT-3 with a prompt like "The following text contains typos; please fix them." The author claims it's very accurate (enough so to support a paid product), and I thought it was a pretty clever trick when I read about it.

This is awesome, thank you!

Depends on why you are doing it. If it is for reference and retention, you'd probably be best off taking a picture and then writing your own summary and thoughts than just typing it all out.

Good OCR (something like recent versions of Tesseract, see here for a good frontend, though using the cli on PDF files works great) and going through the output to find the inevitable mistakes is the fastest method in my experience. Typing it all yourself is less annoying but takes more time and isn't any less error prone.

You can also pay someone to do it if your time is worth too much.

using the CLI on PDF files

That might actually help quite a bit. Thanks, I'll check this out.

When should we privilege the phenomenological over the pharmacological?

There are herbal remedies that people swear induce some certain desired state. Scientists attempt to discover the underlying chemical structures that induce the state, but they don’t always get it right. I’ve come across some interesting cases of this. There’s valerian root, which only recently was found to interact with adenosine (having previously been discarded as an insomnia treatment). There’s California Poppy, which was only recently discovered to contain Reticuline, which in turn was only recently discovered to induce an opioid response in the brain. There are all sorts of things going on with cannabis which are not related to THC but instead implicate a THC/CBD synergy and plausibly the addition of chemical structures known as terpenes. There are the essential oil studies that clearly indicate certain odors induce alertness (bitter lemon) or relaxation (lavender). Then there’s the science of things like serotonin which are hardly understood at all — only recently did we learn that tryptophan will selectively unbind with albumin at the blood brain barrier, and only recently has the consensus shifted to serotonin deficiency lacking a role in depression (although I have my own views on this).

Essentially, if a person asserts “the aerial parts of the Phenomena Logicila plant make me happy”, and a scientist looking at a paper finds no clear mechanism for this to occur… what do we say? The science is never conclusive or half-finished, and maybe the person has a unique physiological or genetic profile that corresponds to the feeling. What should a reasonable person do?

I'm not certain to understand what your goal is with that question,

a pharmacological causative model is heuristically useful to make predictions, about effectiveness for condition X and to establish a safety, tolerance, toxicity and interaction profile.

All those things are useful but mostly unecessary for the layman.

If there is a non-negligible community that takes plant X since years in quantity Y and that doesn't report huge terrifying side effects and that they report potent effectiveness then its probably worth a try for acute use although for long term use there will always be a toxicity/accelerated ageing question but in many cases we never know for certain however in most cases we do know reasonably somewhat the safety profiles.

It has actually become very rare to find phytochemicals that have not been extensively studied regarding their pharmacology and hence the causative model is often well established assuming you take time to research the research.

But beyond annecdtotal evidence, doing a blind test scientific trial about wether X is effective for Y, e.g. depression is very cheap and therefore even without said causative model we often know wether X has elicited a potent response for Y in N people empirically following precise protocol.

Empiricisms as always trumps a priori reasoning regarding effort efficiency and indeed people should considering the mostly safe profile of phytochemicals (generalization see e.g. cyclopamide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopamine#/media/File:Cyclopelamb2.jpg) play much more the lab rats, this would drive very significantly the speed of empirical scientific research and therefore discovery of treatments for ineptly considered incurable diseases.

edit:

only recently did we learn that tryptophan will selectively unbind with albumin at the blood brain barrier

What does that imply? We already knew tryptophan cross the BBB. You mean the competition with tyrosine?

only recently has the consensus shifted to serotonin deficiency lacking a role in depression (although I have my own views on this).

What?

Serotonergics are euphorisant see e.g. MDMA, MDAI, 5MAPB, shrooms, etc

The effect of SSRIs is less intuitive (reduction of sert receptors density) but still sert driven.

No, the original thought on how tryptophan crosses BBB was extremely murky, because it a lesser competitor to other LNAAs. So we knew that we could toggle greater crossing by reducing the competitors (see wurtman lab) by flushing LNAA to to muscle via pure carbohydrate insulin spike (tryptophan stays bound to albumin). We also knew exercise increases serotonin synthesis, and tryptophan depletion decreases this. What was relatively new, I believe from 2015-2018, was that tryptophan selectively unbinds with albumin at the BBB, so the albumin-bound tryptophan will release uniquely there. It’s an example of how we know little about the mechanisms of serotonin. There’s also controversy about whether how important T:LNAA ratio is to sum total T, the mice studies are not clear. Maybe I’ll dig up the metastudy I read a bit ago

Re: serotonin, I don’t actually disagree, but the consensus I read was that “more serotonin” does not decrease depression.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0

The distinction I would make is that these studies are flawed and there is actually very limited ways to organically increase serotonin production in the brain: increasing dietary T:LNAA ratio (also found to be widely healthful per a large Japanese population cohort study, on things like sleep); using fruit to flush LNAA muscle tissue; or exercise (somehow; possibly by using up LNAAs).

There are some other interesting things about this: certain human domesticated crops have higher tryptophan than wild-type; there’s a possibility fruit consumption in humans is kind of evolved to increase serotonin, and certain fruit actually have serotonin itself, like kiwi and strawberry, which is fascinating

Thanks Cafe, that is a great comment, exactly the kind of informatively rich comments the motte desperately lacks.

I will give you a proper answer tomorrow but when I said that tryptophan cross the BBB, I actually meant about 5 hydroxy tryptophan (5htp), which has good bioavailability, cross the BBB and bypass the rate limiting enzyme conversion of L-tryptophan to 5htp (which itself downstream will again be converted to serotonin in a rate limited manner)

1998:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9727088/

What should a reasonable person do?

Try to confirm that the risks of harm are low and then continue to use them?

My general impression is that part of the reason people like "herbal" and "natural" remedies is due to fear of outsized side-effects from pharmaceuticals and the perception that herbal remedies are less dangerous. I have an aunt who would rather drink chamomile and valerian and tough out insomnia than get hooked on sleeping pills.

If the risk is low and the subjective experience is better...track it and continue?

phytochemicals are extremely interesting actually and a surprisingly high number of synthetic drugs are derivatives or imitations of phytos or endogenous molecules.

People use to joke/ridiculize them but there is nothing more ridicule than a human that ridiculize billion of years parallel bidirectional (both the molecule and the body adapt) optimization of phamacological pathways towards maximizing host or symbionts survival or other advantageous metrics.

The issue with phyto (some can be toxic btw) is that many have bad bioavailability and sometimes suboptimal pharmacokinetics or half-lives.

Both of those problems can be trivially solved, either by bypassing first pass metabolism via vitamin C and or increasing lipophilia absorption via co-administration of omega-3 and or via inhibiting the CYP 450 enzymes via e.g. piperine or grappefruit juice (beware can be dangerous with many synthetic drugs as it potentiate wildly their metabolism hence dose potency, profile and half lives)

Empirical results > logic and theoretical mechanisms. The most clear demonstration of this is general anaesthesia, which continues to lack an agreed-upon theoretical mechanism, makes no logical sense, and yet very clearly works. Anything less than taking empirical results above neat theories ceases to be science.

Is there a relatively simple explanation somewhere about why anesthesia makes no sense? I keep hearing this without anyone ever going into details, and it sounds like exactly the kind of thing I would find very amusing.

So there's this way to get a human, and knock them out, that's safe! And not only that, but while they've lost consciousness, they have no memory of this happening. And they don't feel pain. And then, once the anaesthesia wears off, they wake up, almost entirely side-effect free! When the closest alternative is to whack someone in the head hard enough that they fall unconscious, which is significant more dangerous, it sure awfully convenient. The sum effects are equivalent to a coma or severe brain damage, but entirely reversible! Like it is some specific procedure that exists purely for the purpose of enabling surgery. How nonsensical it is for the body to have the ability to do this, given there would be no possible use for this back when we wandered the savanna 100,000 years ago? And yet, we do have this ability. A hidden off switch that can be controllably flicked with a few relatively easy to acquire gases.

Aliens?

More seriously, is it that we don't understand how it works, or why it evolved?

There are competing hypotheses for how it works, but nothing conclusive.

A while back on 4chan, I saw an interesting quote from a book that said something along the lines of:

The larger a system is, the less diversity it can support. Something something, the galapagos islands have vastly more biodiversity than north America despite being much smaller

Now, I didn't save the picture, and it was photograph of a page of a book. I tried searching for "larger" "system" "less diversity" "support", but you know how terrible google is about finding anything that isn't an "approved" mainstream news article nowdays. I ended up finding a paper called Why do several small patches hold more species than few large patches? that was tangentially related, but it seems to be more focused on conservation. Any idea what I could search for to find more information about this as a general topic? I feel like this could "The larger a system is, the less diversity it can support" is a very interesting premise that could describe a lot of topics, especially sociological and economic topics.

If you know the thread title, or any sequence of words in the thread, you can search on the 4plebs archive website to try to find it.

I think a large area allows for generalist - specialist creatures. That's not a great term, but animals that evolve that can counter common survival strategies.

It's probably more clear if I give some examples.

Giant bugs are common on islands. At least until humans accidentally introduce rats. Then suddenly all the giants bugs are gone.

House cats are amazing at wiping out unique bird species.

Australia is famous for its large number of venomous species. It also doesn't have any mustelidae. Honey badgers would be very successsful.

Australia is famous for its large number of venomous species. It also doesn't have any mustelidae. Honey badgers would be very successsful.

I really don't think honey badgers will be able to evolve resistance to the entire palette of Australians venomous critters, much less come pre-equipped.

House cats are amazing at wiping out unique bird species.

House cats are really good at destroying wildlife overall. very efficient killers

Feral house cats, the ones who were born on the streets and raised by nature, are terrific at killing. Those raised in houses by humans are quite inefficient. especially those who know they have a home to return to, and food to eat.

Take care to spay or neuter your captive fluffy descendants of the beasts who hunted your ancestors. Those who can spawn will inevitably screw.

I suspect the disparity between island bird species vs continental bird species capacity to protect are much greater than between-cats attack capacity disparity.

This is a wild guess. But my intuition is that:

Let's model a system as follows.

  • There exists a space where multiple agents have to compete for some finite and some infinite resources.

  • Some of these agents spawn stochastically.

  • Agents can grow and die. (Assume some randomness here too)

  • Agents can destroy other agents and absorb them.

  • Agents have some kind of gravitational field, where a larger size is a competitive advantage.

  • The above feature ensures power law distributed size.

Leading to; In a large system, given enough time; Certain agents can gather such 'mass' that they just immediately kill or absorb any new agents that pop up. And they are disproportionately harder to fight against as time goes on.

Think monopolies, think mainstream culture, think religions. The system I intuited above can describe memetic systems at a certain level of abstraction.

the galapagos islands have vastly more biodiversity than north America

Is that actually true? And in which terms "more biodiversity" - more species in general, starting from Archaea and viruses up to primates? More species per square inch? Did somebody really conduct such a research? How did they count the species and what was the result?

The larger a system is, the less diversity it can support. Something something, the galapagos islands have vastly more biodiversity than north America despite being much smaller

As has been mentioned below, it depends what you mean by "more biodiversity". I seriously doubt this is true in an absolute sense - North America covers a much larger range of biomes than the Galapagos and therefore likely has a higher total number of species. On the other hand, the Galapagos might win out if you're measuring biodiversity by species per square inch, but that's to be expected given that the Galapagos is situated in a warm equatorial environment whereas North America is a much larger landmass that includes extremely cold northerly environments and contains biomes like taiga where biodiversity is generally low, so that drags down the average.

I ended up finding a paper called Why do several small patches hold more species than few large patches? that was tangentially related, but it seems to be more focused on conservation.

It makes sense that this would be the case. The geographical isolation of populations from each other allows for allopatric speciation, where two populations of the same species diverge because they get to develop in isolation without gene flow between the groups (example: the Abert and Kaibab squirrels). Populations being dispersed into several small patches of habitat as opposed to a few larger ones clearly helps enable this process.


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