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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34639 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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I think you have to be pretty "mind-killed", IE have drunk deeply from the Progressive/Marxist Kool-Aid to sincerely believe that "group differences" in genetics are not only going to outweigh individual variation, along with as other group-wide factors like culture and social policy, but outweigh them to such a degree that those factors can be safely dismissed as unmeaningful.

How do you get different species at all? Populations diverge until they are different species. It looks like most of progeny neardertal-sapiens was infertile. Where's Flores Hobbits now? They didn't die because of climate change, nor they were assimilated.

Black Americans and White Americans aren't living on different sides of Iron Curtain set by a totalitarian dictatorship(s). Same language, same religion, same currency, same sports, same worship of Kim Kardashian's rear parts.

Hmmm, I'm not sure I understand your point. To be uncharitable, this looks like exactly the sort of creative misdirection I was talking about. The NYT dismisses the possibility of different amounts of tax fraud between races for any reason. Whether or not it's genetic, or whether other factors might be more important, are separate questions, and are secondary to the question of whether the fraud detection algorithms are biased. Again, I'm saying that even acknowledging group average differences in behavior as a possible explanation for group average differences in outcome is already less mind-killed than most of my interlocutors.

Since I have you here, what do you mean when you say that a group-level difference could "outweigh" individual level variation? They're just two levels of variation, and nothing changes if one is bigger than the other - they're both still there.

He's trying to equate HBD with wokism but imo it doesn't really make any sense

I'm equating one flavor of socialist infused identity Politics to other flavors of socialist infused identity politics.

Hmmm, I'm not sure I understand your point. To be uncharitable, this looks like exactly the sort of creative misdirection I was talking about.

And to be blunt, I could say the exact same thing to you.

Charitably you're latching on to genetics because it seems easy to quantify/measure, life would be so much simpler for the budding academic if things like intelligence, virtue, and propensity to defraud the government could be determined via a simple blood-test or looking at an individual's skin color. See the old saw about the drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp.

Less charitably you seem to be tying yourself in knots to avoid considering the possibility that the IRS might be following perverse incentives. One of the reasons you might being doing this is that your ideology requires you to frame things a certain way (IE in terms of the intersectional stack) while discounting the importance of individual character/agency. You believe that group differences exist, they are meaningful, and they are wholly a product of genetics, because biological determinism, and Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics say they must be so, and believing those things is what separates rational high-status human-beings from the plebs and chatbots.

Less charitably you seem to be tying yourself in knots to avoid considering the possibility that the IRS might be following perverse incentives.

I'm not OP, but would you mind clarifying whether you personally in fact believe that the racial difference in audit frequency is due to the IRS following perverse incentives, and if so which perverse incentives? And, if you do, do you believe that astrolabia does not believe that the disparate results are causally downstream of the IRS following the incentives which you believe are perverse?

Because I predict that both you and astrolabia believe that

  1. The IRS is more likely to audit tax returns where there is a high probability of a small amount of easy-to-prove fraud than tax returns where there is a small probability of a large amount of hard-to-prove fraud, even when the expected monetary value of prosecuting the rare annoying high-value fraud would be higher

  2. If you were to segment tax returns by (race of filer, was EITC claimed, had obvious inconsistencies), then audit frequency would vary based on whether there were obvious inconsistencies when holding (race of filer, was EITC claimed) constant.

  3. Audit frequency would not vary significantly based on race when holding (was EITC claimed, had obvious inconsistencies) constant.

  4. Holding (was EITC claimed) constant, (had obvious inconsistencies) would vary significantly by race.

I don't think "the IRS follows perverse incentives" and "propensity to have obvious, easily provable inconsistencies when filing taxes varies by race" are mutually exclusive hypotheses, and honestly I don't expect that either hypothesis is even particularly contentious (unless you make the stronger assertion that the rate of inconsistencies varies due to genetics rather than education quality or other environmental factors, but then you're just dealing with the standard "HBD discourse is brain poison" problem).

Yes, I agree with all 4 points. I think you're also right that HlynkaCG agrees with me on these points.

I think what happened here is that, HlynkaCG saw me defend discussion of the possibility that there might be group differences in behavior (possibly due to poverty, or whatever the palatable explanation of the month is, I didn't say), saw this (correctly) as allowing more avenues for arguments in favor of HBD, and became mind-killed.

I'm not OP, but would you mind clarifying whether you personally in fact believe that the racial difference in audit frequency is due to the IRS following perverse incentives, and if so which perverse incentives?

It's no secret that due to factors both historical and cultural, blacks are disproportionately represented in lower to middle ends of the socio-economic spectrum within the US. Likewise it's no secret that the IRS disproportionately targets the lower and middle classes for the reasons already described. The Idea that this must be about race (because how could it not be) rather than IRS agents simply following through on their instructions/incentives is where the partisanship/id-pol comes in.

When you say "about" race I'm genuinely unsure what you mean - the reading that seems most natural to me is "the difference in audit frequency by race is causally downstream of race", which seems obviously and almost tautologically true to me.

But you have a history of making insightful posts, so I'm guessing you mean something else which is not that. I'm not sure what though (again, not intended as a gotcha, I'm just not understanding how "the IRS follows incentives" is an alternative hypothesis instead of "an additional factor that is causally upstream of the observation").

Or maybe I can just read between the lines and recognize that "meaningful group differences" is a shibboleth for various flavors of HBD partisan.

I'm sorry, I never raised the issue of genetics, I was only talking about group differences in behavior in general. I also heartily agree that the IRS could easily be following perverse incentives. I have no idea what you mean about Hegelian dynamics here, nor how individual character + agency precludes discussions of average differences in behavior between groups, which the article raised as a possibility.

I would really love it if you'd read my first reply again - I wasn't claiming that group differences explain anything here. I was saying that it's astounding the variety of behaviours people will display if prompted to acknowledge, in principle, the possible existence of average group differences (genetic or otherwise). Do you think such differences are possible?

Do you really get the runaround on those sorts of questions? Because in my experience, if you give social sciences types any opportunity to talk about factors that could affect metrics of success by race / gender / immigration status / whatever, they will happily talk your ear off for hours. They are unlikely to mention genetic factors (outside of epigenetics and "did you know about DNA methylation [...] response to stress"), but that will not stop them enthusiastically brainstorming hypotheses and what studies one might run to test those hypotheses for as long as you're willing to listen.

I don't get to talk with many social scientists, but the two I've talked to about these things were so appalled by the mere suggestion that I quickly shut up. But for example, a Bayesian ecologist told me that his prior on there being differences in behavior driving differential arrest rates was 0 (I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean). A mathematician who said epigenetic trauma was an explanation for poor black outcomes, astoundingly also suggested that Jews' excellent outcomes after the holocaust were also due to epigenetic trauma. Like, that hypothesis wouldn't have even occurred to me in a million years.

The behavior I've seen is consistent with people sensing that they are discussing something sacred and not to be questioned. I've made my peace with this - except when it comes up in relation to policy discussions. In those cases, I wish we had some galaxy-brained norm about separation of church and state that we could invoke. In fact, that might be a great contribution to diffusing the culture wars - some version of "Render unto the racists..."

It seems likely to me that the slaves embedded the learnings into their culture that hard work and investment into education is rather pointless, while Jews adopted the survival strategy of high-value autonomous jobs like doctors and musicians. Basically, before modern licensing you could just pack up and leave when doing those jobs, if things got spicy. And the better a doctor/musician/etc you are, the better the chance you get spared. Even in the extermination camps, top-tier musicians were often spared and got better treatment.

None of this requires (epi)genetics, but can simply have become embedded in the culture (although culture can obviously impact mate selection, like the stereotype of Jewish parents demanding that their daughters come home with a doctor).

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