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Notes -
On (Noticing) IQ (When You're Allowed To)
I was writing a reply to @TowardsPanna 's question in the SSQ thread that got a bit out of control. Large enough that I decided to just post it here too.
For what it's worth, none of these ideas are particularly new, at least they aren't if you compulsively browse LessWrong (or even read a lot of Scott), but the older I get, the more I realize that novelty is often just a nice-to-have.
Yes. Of course?
Humans aren't stupid. We’re expert pattern-matchers. We’re distinctively evolved to be relentless Bayesian updaters, constantly scanning our environment for correlations that offer a survival or status advantage. We’re Noticers™. The problem is that we’ve built a civilization where noticing the most predictive variable for life outcomes is considered a faux pas at best and a moral failing at worst. It’s common now to explicitly state, in corporate policy or legislation, that specific classes of Bayesian evidence are "fruit of the poisonous tree" and have to be ignored.
Like many well-intentioned interventions that hinge on obscuring reality, it doesn't work: when you outlaw the most accurate map, people don’t stop navigating. They just buy worse maps.
In the ancestral environment, we didn't have the Raven’s Progressive Matrices (only the Modern Hunter Gatherer has had the privilege). We did, however, have proxies. We had vocabulary size, wit, speed of learning. In the modern environment, we’ve muddied the waters. We’ve got proxies that look like intelligence but are actually just measuring conformity to the upper-middle-class Blue Tribe aesthetic. We look at credentials, which are increasingly just a measure of "willingness to sit still and follow instructions for four years."
(Please note that I don't think that education is purely credentialism. This is a disease that affects midwits first and foremost. A bachelor's in physics is a stronger signal than one in sociology.)
So when we agree to pretend that "mental horsepower" is a myth, or that it’s entirely malleable via the Growth Mindset, we don’t actually create a flat hierarchy. We just create an opaque one. We create a hierarchy based on the performance of competence rather than the reality of capacity.
This leads to a specific kind of societal gaslighting. The narrative is that anyone can be a doctor or a quantum physicist if they just work hard and acquire knowledge. If someone fails to climb the ladder, the implication is that they stupidly chose not to grow their brain. They lacked grit. They lacked character. In a world where aptitude is taboo, failure’s always a moral deficit.
The obvious analogy is a world where the Paralympics and the "normal" Olympics are wrapped up into a single event. Anyone, including the disabled athletes, who points out that missing a leg makes one very unlikely to win in the 100m sprint is immediately walloped and then piled-upon, with cries of "the Science! Not-Murray et al clearly showed, in their landmark 1998 paper, that the number of remaining lower limbs had no relation to performance in the sleighing, shooting and arm wrestling categories. The 2012 Olympics were studied in great detail, and it was confirmed that Usain Bolt had the same number and arrangement of legs as his closest competitors."
When the person with no legs fails to win the 100m sprint, the commentators nod gravely and say, "He just didn't want it enough. He failed to manifest the victory."
I see three main mechanisms driving this, and why the average person (even the smart average person) underestimates the sheer weight of g.
The "All Men Are Created Equal" Overcorrection:
We’ve engaged in a concerted propaganda campaign for decades suggesting that because moral equality is mandatory, biological identity must also be mandatory. This makes it practically unthinkable to consider that it’s perfectly possible to construct a political system that grants equal rights to all citizens while acknowledging that not everyone can visualize a rotating 3D cube with equal fidelity. But biting that bullet feels dangerous to many. It feels like opening the door to old aristocracies. So instead, we pretend the differences don't exist, which inadvertently creates a new aristocracy of "people who know the right shibboleths."
The Bubble and the Range Restriction:
This is the big one. We live in intense cognitive bubbles.
If you’re reading this, you probably spend your life surrounded by people within one standard deviation of your own IQ. You went to a selective university. You work in a cognitive field. You live in a zip code priced for high-earners.
You can go days, maybe weeks, without having a meaningful conversation with someone significantly below an IQ of 100, or even +- 1SD outside of yours.
This creates a statistical illusion known as range restriction. If you look at the NBA, height doesn't correlate very strongly with points scored. Everyone’s already tall; therefore, the variance in performance seems to come from practice, grit, and shooting form. If you looked at the general population, height would be the single biggest predictor of basketball ability (because the 5’5” guy isn't getting the rebound).
Imagine if the NBA had a rule that you couldn't mention height. You'd still need to pick players, so you'd start using proxies. You'd talk about "reach" and "wingspan" and "vertical leap." You'd notice that certain players had better "court vision" or "positional awareness." And all of these would be real skills, but they'd also be correlated with height, and height would still be determining who made it into the league in the first place. The difference is that now you'd be pretending you weren't noticing height at all, which would make you more likely to mistake the packaging for the product.
In your life as a student or a professional, you look around at your peers. You see that Alice is doing better than Bob. Since Alice and Bob are both roughly equally smart (they both made it this far), you attribute Alice’s success to her conscientiousness, her charm, or her work ethic. You conclude, erroneously, that "intelligence doesn't matter much, it’s all about hard work."
You don’t see the people who were both dumber and less hardworking than you; they’re in a different social class entirely. You rarely see the people who are simultaneously smarter and more hardworking; they’re running hedge funds or solving alignment theory and don’t hang out at the hospital cafeteria. These are far more likely to be acquaintances rather than peers.
The problem is when we generalize from this filtered view. We start believing that because IQ doesn't predict success within our bubble, it must not predict success period. We see a colleague who's a bit slower but works incredibly hard and does fine, and we extrapolate that to everyone. We forget that the slow colleague is still in the 85th percentile of the general population, and that the person in the 30th percentile who works just as hard isn't a doctor at all, they're doing something else, probably something that pays worse and doesn't sound as impressive on a Hinge profile (see proxies re-emerging?).
The Opacity of Alien Competence:
Some professions are more segregated than others. An ER physician arguably sees a more representative slice of humanity than a family medicine specialist, who sees a more representative slice than a Google L10, but the direction of judgment is difficult.
When a patient comes to see me, I’m performing a distinct ritual. I listen to symptoms, I peer at them significantly, I type things into a computer. To the patient, the output seems to appear from thin air. A sufficiently competent doctor makes it look like they never broke a sweat. A less experienced one (like me) makes up for it by projecting confidence and then panic-Googling the interaction effects of MAOIs in the bathroom later.
The patient can't judge my raw processing power. They can only judge my bedside manner, my clothes, and my degree on the wall. They’re judging the paint job.
When I'm on call and a patient is rambling in a disorganized way, using neologisms, showing thought disorder, I don't need to know their IQ score to recognize that something is cognitively wrong. But when I'm in the doctors' lounge, listening to two consultants argue about whether a patient's depressive symptoms are primarily biological or reactive, I also don't need IQ scores to know who's making the sharper arguments. The difference is that in the first case, we're allowed to talk about cognitive impairment. In the second case, we're allowed to talk about "clinical judgment" or "experience" or even "medical education," but we're not supposed to talk about the underlying mental horsepower that makes one doctor better at diagnostic reasoning than another.
(Ideally, the whole point of the medical education system and associated exams is to put the gatekeeping before patient contact. When you see an MD in the wild, you ideally want to not need to bother with asking for a transcript of their grades, nor fear that they don't know the safe limit for paracetamol. The reasons why this idyllic state of affairs doesn't hold are too lengthy to fit on this margin. Be smart about things.)
Conversely, I can't judge the competence of a senior software engineer. I know enough Python to automate a spreadsheet, but can I distinguish between a decently competent programmer and a 10x developer without referencing their credentials or status? Probably not.
This brings us back to the original shower thought. If we can't discuss the engine, we obsess over the trim.
In a "blue" environment where social class is ostensibly "over" and never discussed, it’s actually the primary sorting algorithm. We use heuristics like "do they speak with a Received Pronunciation or General American accent?" or "do they know the current correct terminology for this specific social justice concept?" to decide who’s smart.
This favors the people living and breathing inside the dominant culture. It favors the legacy admission who knows how to dress and speak. It subtly closes out the dissenting voice from the outsider who might have raw supercomputer-level processing power but speaks with a regional accent, wears ill-fitting clothes, and hasn't learned the subtle dance of feigning humility while signaling status.
Some professions, like programming, are comparatively more sane/honest. You can have a perfectly decent career in FAANG if you don't shower regularly and speak with a lisp, assuming you are actually good at your job. Hell, like the dude with the MLP (pony, not perceptron) resume, you can counter-signal by being incredibly eccentric. If you're still drawing a seven figure salary, then you're worth it.
Speaking very generally, I think society (a vague term, can't help it) needs to move in the direction of more meritocracy, not less. In practice, that looks like more standardized testing, with reduced focus on vibes.
The vibes are, paradoxically, easier to fake than the exam results:
Consider the standard critique of the SAT: "It just measures how rich your parents are."
This is statistically false. The correlation between SAT scores and parental income is real but moderate (around r = 0.4). But compare this to the correlation between parental income and "being captain of the fencing team" or "having a polished personal essay about your volunteer work in Peru" or "speaking with the correct sociolect during an interview."
The SAT is a partially gameable metric. "Holistic" traits are entirely gameable products.
If you are a rich parent with a dim child, you cannot tutor them into a 1600 SAT. You can maybe get them from a 1000 to a 1150. But you can buy them a spot in a prestigious internship. You can hire a consultant to write their essays. You can ensure they have the "right" hobbies.
Since this is my soapbox, and you're presumably still reading this far, I also want to speak out against another approach towards modern fetishization of pseudo-meritocracy, or more accurately, aristocracy.
I should probably elaborate on the @2rafa position, since she's the strongest advocate (only advocate?) She's old money. My impression being not "my parents paid for Stanford" money, but "my great-grandfather's trust fund paid for Stanford's new rowing pavilion" money. She'll happily tell you that the problem with modern society isn't that we sort by intelligence, but that we pretend to sort by intelligence while actually sorting by a particularly vulgar form of striving that she finds aesthetically repulsive.
Her critique goes something like this: The modern PMC striver is a grotesque creature. The Tiger Mom. The résumé-padding, LinkedIn-posting, "crushing it" bugman who measures his self-worth in LeetCode problems solved and whether he made partner by 35. This, she argues, is what you get when you tell everyone that anyone can be elite if they just grind hard enough. You don't get equality. You get a soulless arms race of performative busyness, a cargo cult where the striver apes the surface of elite competence without acquiring the substance.
Better, she says, to return to a system where everyone knows their place. Where the sorting happens early, quietly, and permanently. Where you don't try to be elite, you simply are. Where excellence is demonstrated through effortless grace, not desperate optimization. The boarding school accent. The understated wardrobe that costs more than a car. The ability to discuss Proust and quarterbacks with equal nonchalance. The aristocratic assumption that if you have to ask, you're not one of us, and that's fine. It's a system that rewards being rather than becoming.
From her vantage, this is obviously superior. And I get the appeal. If you're already at the top of the heap by accident of birth, a system that freezes the heap in place is very comfortable. You don't have to worry about some brilliant kid from a refugee camp out-hustling your mediocre son for the last spot at Harvard Medical School. Your son's spot is secure, not because he's particularly gifted, but because he's yours. The system can quietly acknowledge his inherited position without anyone having to say the quiet part out loud. The "genteel" facade is the point, it transforms raw inherited advantage into a question of taste.
This is far from the worst approach. The elites are elites for a reason. That reason is often hereditary. Even total regime change and societal upheaval usually has the dispossessed children of nobility (or the elites) almost inevitably percolate back to the top. This is evident in data from places as far-flung as China, where the grandsons of pre-revolution landlords often outperform their peers. The previous status-quo was bearable, in some ways superior.
However, the aristocratic alternative often ends up parasitic on the very meritocratic machinery it despises. You still need high-g selection somewhere. You still need the engineers, the surgeons, the generals who can think. You can dress that up in tradition and patronage, you can recruit them as client talent, you can offer them a place in the court, but you cannot run a technical civilization on inherited gentility alone. At some point, reality reasserts itself, usually via catastrophe.
But here's where the rubber meets the road: I am that brilliant kid's son. My dad did out-hustle the mediocre sons of privilege. He clawed his way out of a refugee camp because somewhere, a grinding, impersonal system looked at his test scores and said: "This one. This one is worth plucking from the mass and polishing." He wasn't sorted by vibes. He was sorted by a standardized exam that didn't care about his accent, his hand-me-down clothes, or whether he knew which fork to use at a state dinner. It cared whether he could solve the problems in front of him, quickly and correctly.
The "genteel sorting" system that @2rafa prefers would have written him off before he started. He didn't have the right pedigree, the right consonants at the end of his name, the right summer internships. He had the wrong everything except the one thing that actually matters for medicine: the ability to hold a thousand variables in his head while making a decision under pressure. The exam caught that. The "holistic" process would have missed it, distracted by his lack of polish.
So yes, I have a personal bias. I believe in meritocracy because meritocracy is the only reason I'm here, writing this, instead of hauling crates in a warehouse or pulling weeds out of a farm. But my bias aligns with a principle: if we're going to have sorting, and we are, because complex societies require it, then let the sorting be honest. Let it be based on the thing that actually predicts performance, not the cultural markers that predict comfort for the existing elite.
The aristocratic approach pretends it's avoiding Goodhart's Law by refusing to articulate its metrics. But the metric is still there: it's called lineage. It's just a metric that can't be improved upon, only inherited. And while it's true that modern meritocracy is imperfectly gamed (that's what this entire post is about) the solution isn't to replace an imperfect but theoretically climbable ladder with a walled garden whose keys are handed out at birth.
The modern PMC striver is indeed a pathetic figure in many ways. But he's pathetic because he's been lied to. He's been told that credentials are everything, then handed a system where credentials are increasingly just proxies for the ability to acquire credentials. He's been told that growth mindset will make him a doctor, then sorted by an IQ test disguised as the MCAT. His sin isn't striving. His sin is believing the official story, and optimizing for the proxies rather than the underlying reality.
@2rafa's genteel system doesn't fix this. It just makes the proxies even more opaque and even more heritable. It replaces the MCAT with the recommendation letter from your Exeter headmaster. It replaces the LeetCode grind with the unspoken assumption that of course you'll summer at the firm your father's college roommate runs. It removes the last remaining pressure points where someone like my father could punch through.
What we need isn't a return to aristocracy. It's a return to honesty. Acknowledge that g exists, that it matters, and that it's largely heritable. Then build a system that finds the people who have it, wherever they are, however they present. Make the exam harder to game, not easier. Make the credentials less important, not more. And stop pretending that the alternative to vulgar striving is egalitarianism. It's very much not. The alternative is feudalism with better manners.
Sadly, none of this particularly matters in the long-run. The AI will "meritocratically" take your job, and will eventually do it better than you can imagine. My kids aren't going to college. Yours probably won't either. I find that reassuring, in some ways, short timelines taken seriously make a lot of squabbling moot. You can stop running so damn hard, the winner has a jetpack. Isn't that oh, so reassuring?
It's much more terrifying than that. There were two rough branches of the old eugenics movement, American and European. The European school of thought was that to get more quality people, those people should have more children. Deliberately breed your best specimens to get better.
The American school, OTOH, was more concerned with raising the floor by culling the lowest quality people. Ergo, Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood, inspired by the simple notion that if all the black people have abortions, then in a generation or two there just won't be any more black people. Trawling through American history, you'll occasionally stumble across references like "during this decade, the state of X sterilized 50,000 people, mostly the indigent and feeble-minded". This culminated in the 30's when American progressive eugenicists were quite proud to announce that finally a world leader had embraced the obvious logic of their approach to the selective breeding on the animal Man for the improvement of all society - and I'm sure you can guess who they were talking about, and how quickly they all distanced themselves from those positions and claims after 1945.
Basically, leftists have a cognitohazard blind spot on this topic because if they allow themselves to even consider biological inequality then the superstructure of their belief system goes right back to the stuff of nightmares.
I don't know how serious you're being, but Sanger was explicitly anti-abortion. She lumped it in the same basket as infanticide, and wanted widespread contraception in order avoid those things.
I just read Woman and the New Race. Though she praises eugenics, she's more a Malthusian than anything. She really thinks it's the problem of too many kids, or that unfit people shouldn't breed because they can't offer care. Really, her understanding of genetics is pretty vague. She's just as concerned with contraception for those with Tuberculosis as for those with any heritable condition.
Huh, looks like you're mostly right, though the sources I see to double check seem to suggest that she was mostly opposed to abortion because of the high level of danger to the mother.
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I think this goes too far - she certainly was anti-illegal abortions and preferred contraception, but I wouldn't think of her as anti-abortion in a pro-life sense.
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Hmm? I don't mean to accuse you of burying the lede, but the most prominent example of eugenics in living memory would be the Nazis. They were European, they were less than left wing, and they practiced both positive and negative eugenics. More Aryan Uber-babies with three blue eyes (more is better), fewer gypsies and schizophrenics.
The Right is hardly over its own hangups in that department.
I have only rather cursory knowledge of the history of eugenics but based on nothing but this I think some things need to be pointed out. Eugenics was ascendant in the specific historical context of the post-WW1 Western world as a response to the disruptive consequences of the war. Huge numbers of healthy and virile men were killed and wounded which was bound to result in long-term demographic decline. Traditional moral codes were collapsing, divorce rates skyrocketed, promiscuity was on the rise, cultural decadence was everywhere, as was alcoholism, drug addiction etc. The finances of most nations were in disarray, as was international trade.
As a result, proponents of eugenics were generally concerned that a) the birthrate of socially desirable elements will decline, both an absolute numbers and in relation to the birthrate of socially undesirable elements (the feeble-minded, people with hereditary mental illness and disabilities, alcoholics etc.) b) the foundering national economy was going to be burdened by the ever-rising social costs of feeble-minded, morally imbecile social groups growing in number.
It’s small wonder that positive and negative eugenics usually went hand in hand in every nation and federal state which adopted it. (Did it not?) Those who believed in eugenics wanted to curb two larger negative trends overall. It didn’t have that much to do with ideology. Eugenics was even popular in liberal democracies.
With respect to the Nazis I think there’s a politically motivated tendency to gloss over two aspects. One is that there was a secret state campaign to kill the mentally ill and people with hereditary diseases, as others have mentioned, generally called “Merciful death” (Gnadentod) – the expression “Aktion T4” was only invented after the war – specifically aimed at freeing up healthcare resources and diverting them to the war effort (the armed forces were going to need doctors, nurses and hospital beds), plus reducing state healthcare expenditures overall.
It thus had a practical (but of course wholly unethical) purpose and was unique in the world in the sense that it meant extermination and not only sterilization of socially undesirables (which was also a state policy enacted earlier). For this reason I’s argue that it cannot be considered an example of eugenics, which wasn’t even a word the Nazis used (“racial hygiene” was used instead). It has also become common to call this particular policy a case of “euthanasia” which is completely dishonest BS, of course. Another aspect of the Nazi policy of mandatory sterilization was that it specifically targeted people with black ancestry, which is not something that eugenics as such entailed in any other nation, as far as I know.
Eugenics was popular much earlier than that, it was a popular ethos of secular progressives who were very much into Darwinism and espoused social Darwinism as a scientific way to rule nations. It was espoused by Sir Francis Galton, the pioneer of eugenics and Darwin's cousin. It is not dissimilar to current progressive or rationalist ethos: we progressives use science and rationality to improve humanity. Plebs and especially religious backward morons may see things like sterilization as morally abhorent, however they do not see the purity of our work which will diminish pain for all the future generations. The utility gains of our girm work has almost no bounds, we need to find our courage and moral firmness to go through this.
It is also unsurprising what happened after it all failed. Progressives as usual declared that eugenic progressives were not true progressives, and that in fact they were far right Nazis - the same as they washed their hands from support of Stalinism and many other crimes they came up with. But it is in fact in their DNA.
I agree but as far as I know it was after the catastrophe of WW1 that the project of eugenics assumed a sense of urgency in the minds of its proponents.
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For the Nazis, the individual was completely subordinated to the Volk. The victims of T4 were considered genetically inferior, so they would not give birth of the Germans of tomorrow, and also unable to work for the present needs of their Volk, so for the Nazis they served no purpose, and were thus killed.
To be considered a useless mouth to feed, being disabled was not enough. After all, a woman who has lost a leg in an accident can still serve her people and fatherland by giving birth to a lot of soldiers and soldier-birthers. Only being disabled because of a genetic disease was worthy of death by CO poisoning in a van, because in that case she might contaminate the gene pool of the next generation.
The difference between eugenics and Rassenhygiene seems like a particularly fine hair to split.
Eugenics is basically: "Not all genetic variants are equally valuable and we should strive to increase the quality of our gene pool."
Rassenhygiene is: "The gene pool (not that they had the word, but certainly an equivalent concept) of our noble Volk is under assault from both without and within. Other, lesser races try to contaminate our noble bloodlines with their inferior heritage, and undesirable traits manifest themselves sometimes even within pure-blooded families. Like dog breeders, we must therefore prevent our women from coupling with inferior men and cull anyone whose blood would weaken the German Volk no matter their heritage."
If this does not convince you, consider the positive eugenics the Nazis engaged in. Lebensborn was the program led by Himmler himself. This included finding racially superior children among the Untermenschen in the occupied territories, which were then kidnapped and Germanized (or gassed, if they the SS doctors thought they had genetic problems or were not racially valuable enough to contribute to the Volk).
So I am with @self_made_human here, Nazi Germany went all-in on both positive and negative eugenics, albeit with a clear flavor of racial purity.
Noted. My basic point is this: numerous Western nations practiced eugenics back then, including Germany. With the exception of the latter, these policies did not entail extermination or open racial discrimination anywhere. To address these two Nazi policies and then categorize them as ‘eugenics’ is thus biased and frankly propagandistic in my view.
Unfortunately or not, that applies to eugenics as a whole. At its core it’s a collectivist policy that subordinates the autonomy of the individual to the interests of ‘the people’, putting an obvious strict limit on reproductive freedom if it is deemed necessary.
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This is silly. Nazis borrowed heavily from American Eugencists and FDR borrowed heavily from Mussolini. Modern leftism derives a lot of its roots and ideas from 1920s American Progressives, 1920s Eugenicists, Facists, and the USSR Communists. One of their most major arguments with Fascism, for instance, is its aesthetics (see the newest, or one of the newer Ezra Klein podcasts where he and his "fascism expert" guest malign how fascists deride fat people and ugly art/architecture). I'd agree with the idea that there is a very fine line between a modern progressive and a person who thinks we should re-start mass sterilization, and most of that fine line is IQ denialism.
Other types of ideology can weather the storm. The anti-slavery folks of the 1850s didn't think blacks were equal in talent to whites, they derived their views in other ways. So could the modern Christian conservative.
That is American Eugenicists -> Fascists -> FDR -> American Progressives -> Modern Leftists. If I'll give you the last one for free, which still leaves four degrees of separation.
I will grant you that the early pro-choice movement likely did not consider every possible child equally valuable for society for reasons of genetics and race as well as environment. (Apart from the race aspect, I do not think they are totally wrong. "You exist because your daddy was too drunk to wear a condom correctly and your mum too optimistic to go for plan B, and because abortion is illegal" is not a great set of dice rolls for a new character. Giving the women choice is a non-evil (unless you are Christian) to counter the unfortunate selection effects of g-dependent birth control).
Okay, walk me through this.
The SJP are the ones in IQ denial, correct?
What exactly is IQ denial for you? The negation of HBD? The rejection of intelligence as a concept of colonizers? Accepting IQ, but denying any heritability (blank-slatism)?
I have to admit that 'a SJP who embraces HBD' does not invoke a particularly coherent image in my head, same as for 'a nihilist who finds Jesus' or 'a triangle without corners'.
Is the idea that they would embrace HBD and basically advocate for forced sterilization of low g people to raise population intelligence? Or that they would embrace white supremacism? Or that they would double down on their initial ideas about group differences, and try to form the world towards their own ideals, forcibly sterilizing smart Ashkenazim and stupid members of what they identify as low-g races to create an utopia where race is uncorelated with intelligence?
Given that forced sterilizations seem bad and any woke could be reading our conversation at this very moment, do you think it is safe to make them even aware of the fact that you consider them in IQ denial lest they cross your thin line and turn into monsters?
Or is it possible that you were simply signaling 'boo outgroup' by saying 'if $enemy realized ${thing they deny}, they would do ${evil action}'.
I wouldn't dare rely merely on the fallacy of inheritance. Rather I would say that most of the bigger ideas remain the same. The Modern Leftist vision for Banks, Tech, and Medicine, for example, isn't a socialist system, its a fascist system. Private actors ostensibly maintain ownership of the means of production, but their ability to make meaningful decisions that the regime disagrees with is practically zero (this has yet to happen with tech, but the Biden administration showed their hand and vision WRT that sector).
They also routinely deploy street militia to agitate and intimidate. A holdover. Still obsessed with race, just in a different way. Still obsessed with abortion and fertility control. And much more if we want to continue going down that way.
I will proceed as if this means "Social Justice Person(People?)" The correct notation I am aware of is SJW.
Any and all.
If you took the rest of the worldview, which says that abortion is great, the state should be involved with everyone's business all the time, the poor must be provided welfare and healthcare so they dont die in the street, and the state should spend vast amounts of money on education and childcare. You get to Eugenics very quickly if you don't have blank slatism. Its the only way to avoid human suffering and a permanent class of wards of the state. Sterilization of Low-g people is the low hanging fruit. Noticing that certain groups are different in average g is step 2. Sterilizing Ashkenazim may be a thing some places do out of tribal self preservation as the Nazis did. Who knows what exact type of derangement would emerge. I certainly didnt anticipate in 2015 that 10 years later the progressive shibboliths would be chicks with dicks playing high school track meets and Somali fraudsters shouldn't be deported, but here we are.
Forced sterilizations are only bad if you are Christian. If they are not they should advocate for them based on their principles. I think, currently laid bare they would be forced to openly advocate for the abortion of all white male children. Which would show them to the world as their true selves.
"If only my opponents actually followed what I think their principles are they would be shown as
their true selvesthe complete opposite of who they are" is an argument that doesn't even work in practice against Christians. And Christians have a literal book they purport to follow the teaching of, on pain of infinite torture in hell.More options
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Judging by urban TFR, mass sterilization has been ongoing in progressive areas (and progressive countries more broadly) for quite some time now.
They prefer the imported humans over the domestic ones- once the economic opportunity per capita to support a middle class vanishes, the limited number of spaces at the top means they can simply staff them all with IQ denialists, and the low-IQ will keep the people who would have been the middle in line.
This is European domestic policy in a nutshell.
Of course- they had "alternate ways of knowing" and "it's just not Heckin' Nice", which is part of how modern progressives delude themselves into the pretense that they're still the anti-slavery faction (while doing literally everything they can to impose it, like importing an underclass that is indistinguishable from a slave class in the way the population is permitted to treat them, then pushing the costs of that onto the people who now have to compete with those slaves by giving them benefits reserved for citizens).
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I find it amusing to point out that, in America, modern day positions on abortion have very little correlation with 1930 positions on abortion, but a lot of correlation with 1930 views on eugenics. Eugenics was, in the American sense, a progressive movement, albeit one which looks kinda strange today- just like temperance.
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Yes, that's literally the example I was talking about. Progressives in charge of American Eugenics organizations in the early 30's had very kind words to say about the "fine Mr. Hitler" for finally being willing to try to implement "sterilize all the bad people" on a national level. Then of course, things went a little off the rails, to put it lightly. The right/left divide was... weirder back then. A couple years after that, leftist propogandists were all but begging the US to not get involved in Europe and just let the Nazis and Soviets conquer the place, please bro, remember how much the trenches in WW1 sucked, just stay out. And then Hitler betrayed Stalin, broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and those same propogandists literally had their anti-war books and records recalled to be replaced with paeans to the glory of battle.
But for the overall point, imagine if you believed in HBD and that it was scientifically possible to selectively breed humans just like any other animal and also had a powerful technocratic impulse to run roughshod over democracy and liberty in favor of expert-driven perfection of the masses.
My thesis is that if many progressives allowed themselves to really accept that dumb, violent people have dumb, violent kids, then the same impulse that drives them to ban plastic straws would drive them to support mass sterilization campaigns - rather like it did the last time they considered HBD fit for consideration.
OTOH, they might actually support killing criminals again, so there'd possibly be some upside.
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They're also the primary reason the left distanced itself from eugenics.
The US left still loves Planned Parenthood and Harvard-educated experts; they just like to ignore why Planned Parenthood was started and what Harvard-educated experts said on the topic before the Nazis made the concept verboten.
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One problem with the Nazis is that they were very, very, very bad with eugenics.
Like about as backwards in their biggest focus as you can be. Total unforced error, and extremely ironic given the manpower of the Manhattan Project.
You kinda skipped that detail.
That depends on what you think they were optimizing for.
Not winning a major war or increasing average human intelligence, that's for damn sure.
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The Holocaust was just plain old ethnic hatred, not eugenics. It was never presented as eugenics. The Jews were not dumb, or inferior, they were the enemy. Secretly controlling the banks and puppeteering the Allies against the Germans. They had to be removed from society in order to safeguard the German people. That was the story the Nazis told. (For a long while they were even pretending to be resettling them, rather than admitting they were killing them.)
Aktion T4 was the eugenics program, it focused on killing the disabled.
Sterilization programs went on after the war, in places like Sweden and Switzerland, until the 1970s.
In Greenland, as we learned recently, until 1990s.
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The Nazis both a) backed down on aktion t4, although they tended to quietly reinstate it and b) openly referred to the Jews as inferior repeatedly, running a eugenics program that specifically wanted to produce Aryans.
For the Nazis, a central example of inferior races would be the Slavic peoples. Obviously they should be replaced with Germans for most purposes, but for the time being they could still serve the Reich better through labor than death.
By contrast, the Jews were considered a parasite race. I think that an analogy would be to imagine that we suddenly discover vampires (e.g. of world of darkness) are living among us, killing with impunity, enjoying superpowers, making life miserable for the mortals through manipulating state affairs like they have been doing for millennia.
I do not think that most humans would support a policy of "merely take away their civil rights and companies, but leave them otherwise in peace to use their supernatural skills to scheme their way back into power".
For the Nazis, the two existential threats to the Reich were also Jewish in nature: the US (controlled by Jewish bankers) and the USSR (based on the writings of the Jew Marx, with plenty of Jews among the Soviet elite).
The analogy of the people as a human body ("Volkskoerper") is a common Nazi one. For the Nazis, the Jews were basically a potentially life-threatening infectious disease (like smallpox) of the body of the people, whose eradication was imperative. (I'd argue that they would have viewed the 'gypsies' as a less serious infection, an annoyance which should be wiped out where found but ultimately not a threat to the survival of the Reich.)
This explains why the Nazis started the Shoa before they had won their war, and spent a lot of resources direly needed in what they considered the war for the survival of the German people on their genocide project. Why they kept up the killing even when the Allies advanced and it became apparent that they would not win the war. The holocaust was never a bonus objective for them. It was an independent goal which was arguably as important to them as winning their war.
(In case I am somehow unclear: the Nazis were, in my not so humble opinion, horribly wrong about the Jews (among other topics). The group responsible for millennia of human misery is not the 'Jewish race' or some blood-sucking monsters, but good old h. sapiens torturing his own, and the fucking Nazis were clearly prime examples of their species in that regard.)
I mean, I would at least try imprisoning the vampires and harvesting their blood to keep us all immortal. I don't recall all the caveats of being a ghoul though.
I think the obvious danger is the blood bond. You would want a lot of vitae donors, preferably late generation, so you can feed them using blood of non-human animals.
The effects of drinking the mixed vitae from a lot of different donors i poorly studied, but there is some cause for concern. The side effects of being a ghoul seem manageable, possibly frenzy checks.
To my knowledge, nobody has yet written up an EA impact analysis of ghoulifying the human population.
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Man, imagine if the Nazis actually had a categorization scheme by race that informed their views on eugenics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_racial_theories
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It's interesting to imagine an alternate history where the Nazis had been mildly pro-Jewish. Like, instead of trying to slaughter Jews, they had recruited Jews to help with the war effort.
The Nazis as Nazis wouldn't exist were it not for the failed communist civil war, led by jews. Hell, if Jews weren't who they are Hitler would have never started hating their guts in University. So I find it really hard to imagine such an alternative universe.
I see a report of a comment and I usually check the list of past warnings / bans / AAQCs. Yours is just a long list of crap comments. No AAQCs. Looking through your comment history its just nothing interesting or substantial. I could sum up your stance on every issue as "we should defect harder". With a 4channers sense of what is appropriate, so sometimes you'll suggest things like murdering the wife and children of the healthcare CEO that was killed.
I really don't think this place is right for you. I think you should leave and there is nothing here for you. Your occasional rule-breaking is redeemed by nothing so I don't think we should have to put up with modding you. This comment and most of your other rule breaking violations are not enough to justify a permaban. So this will be a 30-day ban and I'll add a note to have future bans also be a minimum of 30 days.
https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/364212?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/2368/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/355052?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/1841/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/319738?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/1277/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/274640?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/1249/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/269389?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/1100/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/236406?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/1087/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/232497?context=8#context
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He might have decided to look at things in a nuanced way -- to decide that Jews had good aspects and bad aspects. And that in terms of his goals of creating a unified German super-state, it might be better to put Jews in the role of junior partners, not enemies.
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If Hitler hating jews was the jews' fault, is white people being hated by plenty of people the white people's fault?
It's not like whites haven't not just "corroded", but destroyed many societies (while replacing them with their own, which is a different society even if by some standards it is better).
You'll get no argument from me there, the Eternal Anglo state is directly responsible for WW1.
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Even if was the Jews' fault in some sense, it doesn't need to have followed that Hitler's policies would be anti-Jewish to the point of actual genocide.
That being said, I agree with the basic point that it's illogical and inconsistent to hold up Jew hatred as convincing evidence of Jewish misbehavior.
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This website would be bilingual, and probably not for pleasant reasons.
Not pleasant? Speak for yourself!
I've seen how HOI4 games go when both sides get nukes...
Wait that actually sounds cool, how is that?
I'm a big paradox enjoyer but I've never dabbled in HOI4
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Didn’t they get rid of the Jews because they were too clever and people started to think they did societal harm? Good at inventing tech, but would also financially swindle you or push bad pathologies like Sigmund Freud. It seems like every American pop star (or black rapper) had a Jew managing them and pushing their sexuality at a young age. Onlyfans created by a Jew. Something about Jewishness they seem to excel at those roles.
We can’t help but watch and follow along, but 90% of the time it seems like it’s a Jew that created it. My gut says they were also doing things like creating onlyfans back then.
If you believe the stories literal mother-daughter tag-team naked dancers and pimping in berlin.
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The irony there is that the vast majority of Jews who were exterminated were not the integrated, typically pretty secular, educated urban elites.
It was the rural devout Jews. They had neither the means to flee or escape easy detection.
Now do Nobel Prizes.
Jews aren't magically pathological for a society. That's just brain worms.
For instance, lots of prominent leftist/communist thinkers were Jews. But so were Hayek and Friedman, among others.
Yup. It was mostly the "Ellis Island" style jews from the Russian Empire that were purged.
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Hayek too?? Wow. I knew Mises, Rothbard and Friedman, yes.
And Ayn Rand.
yep knew about her. was thinking about actual economists
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I feel like one of the pitfalls of eugenics (then and now) is an assumption about what good genes even means (beyond Sydney Sweeney, apparently). There seems to be a lot more agreement about bad genes: see general consent on the borderline-eugenics of genetic counseling for various diseases, or the general acceptance of anti-incest rules.
You're probably right that Nazis lost out by dismissing a bunch of human capital and (over?)valuing blond hair and blue eyes, but I can't avoid thinking that statement is smuggling in some value judgements about what we should consider the ideal human form. Sure, intelligence is generally valued, but I see a rather open-ended question about the relative merit of maximizing
paperclipschess scores, baseball ability, or height that I'd personally prefer to defer answering.If incest didn't consistently produce still births/literal retardation it wouldn't be the taboo it is the world over.
Yes and no. There's still a strong social stigma against adopted/step siblings getting into a relationship.
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Good Genes is indeed incoherent. Genes can only be fit or not. And fitness is relative to the environment. Therefore, to say Good Genes exist is to say Good Environments exist.
Another way to phrase this is that there is an inverse of eugenics. We could posit a kind of "eu-envirics" focused on changing the environment.
(Insofar as the laws of physics have certain requirements, genetic defects that cause e.g. stillborn births are in all practical sense Bad Genes)
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I'm not advocating for anything other than not exterminating a particular segment of the population having certain talents.
Height is a funny one because of just how tall many European countries are now without any specific program.
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