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It’s only dangerous!
What level of intellect is required to see the violence and murder difference between races?
It’s not dead - but it COULD have been the capital of the free world.
Thank god we got Biggie Smalls and tacos instead.
Do you hate humanity so much that NYC should've had more influence?
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Irish Americans had high rates of criminality until the around the 20th century. And the Irish in Ireland had low IQ's until their country became a banking hub. Lovecraft wasn't wrong to hate and fear the Irish in one sense, but after they were anglicized, the Irish Americans are just another "spicy white" ethnic group.
Certainly, I don't assume unkind things about someone when I hear they have some Irish heritage today.
I think the basic intuition is, sure, there might be genuine cultural or genetic differences that are leading some races to have higher rates of criminality in the United States today, but we don't actually know whether those groups are more like the Irish (where under the right set of societal conditions they might be made to assimilate) or whether it would literally take gene therapy to fix it. Also, the genetic factors for say, criminality, might not be precisely what we think. Just as the Native Americans seem to genuinely have higher genetic risk for alcoholism, I could easily imagine that ADOS black people might be more susceptible to certain kinds of drug addiction and that might end up explaining a large part of the difference in criminality between them and other ethnic groups.
Sure, instead it got the consolation prize of being the wealthiest city in the world, and one of two megacities that makes a major imprint on all of American culture and entertainment.
Specifically targeting the MAOA 2-repeat allele.
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It's debatable whether or not this is an honest presentation of facts, but just assuming it as true for the sake of argument: liberals have been promising to do the same for other populations since time immemorial. American blacks are still not integrated, and Africa is still a basket case. How much longer until you accept you were wrong, ans who will be held accountable for it?
American culture and entertainment are on life support.
In a certain sense, I don't think we can be 100 percent sure until we have computers that can simulate the physics of our biological processes to a high degree of accuracy, because until that point all we will be able to do is genome-wide association studies and find genetic correlations with life outcomes but not explanations for why those correlations exist or whether they are causal. (Though I grant that we could in principle get a physical explanation earlier than that, the same way we figured out that the genetic disorder Phenylketonuria leads to low IQ if one eats a high protein diet due to their body not producing phenylalanine hydroxylase, and thus discovering that with a strict diet people with PKU can have normal IQ's. Genetics is weird sometimes, and interacts with the environment in odd ways.)
I'm perfectly open to the idea that black people might genetically be predisposed to low IQ and personality traits that lead to higher criminality, but I think this is far from proven. It would actually be great news if it was all genetic, because that means we could probably do voluntary eugenics or gene therapies with the right framing and marketing, and be rid of the problem without much issue. If it's cultural, that's much harder to deal with.
I think we're highly biased by our novelty-focused culture, but I would wager that America is producing excellent cultural and entertainment products at least as consistently as Ancient Greece or Rome did.
How often did the ancient world produce a Virgil or a Homer? How often did they coast for a few centuries on the insights of a Galen or an Aristotle?
If you want to enjoy human artistic excellence in the United States, you can find it in virtually every large American city. You like opera? We've got opera. Ballet? Classical music? You could disengage from American pop culture, and probably fly to a different city every week and enjoy great Western art and performances that are probably at least as good as the average of what you could have experienced 500 years ago, or 1000 years ago, or 2000 years ago. Maybe we can't compare to the Gaussian tail artists of those eras, the virtuosos like Beethoven or Chopin, but you probably wouldn't have to look hard to find artists and performers in the top 20% of all of human history all over the United States today, which I think is nothing to sneeze at.
And if you're not rich, there's always the wealth of recordings we have, which give even the common man access to the great performances of the past. For a mere pittance, you could buy the Harvard Classics and immerse yourself in the greatest thoughts of Western thinkers of the last 2500 years.
Maybe it is true that many Americans choose to engage with the new and the now, and ignore the mountain of gold they're born into. But I'm grateful that I've had access to the public domain books on Project Gutenburg since I was in middle school, and got to enjoy works from 1001 Arabian Nights to Plato's Republic for free. I think it is possible, even with brain rot and the nightmare of the algorithm that more people today are engaging with the thought stream of Western civilization than ever before. And let's be honest, most of the servants of Ancient Greece and Rome probably weren't deeply immersing themselves in the art and literature of the era (even if there are notable exceptions like Epictetus and Cleanthes.)
To be fair, Rome was also known for entertaining the masses with blood sports and the like, but Hollywood went from intelligent, well-written movies to Superhero-slop. Now that the audience has grown tired of it, they have apparently become incapable of producing new epics, and are mostly recycling old movies or existing IPs, usually poorly.
All stagnating, mostly simply replaying the same old classics to dwindling audiences.
Yes, the US is very technically proficient. But that is not culture.
Traditional cultures are known for roaming troupes of artists, entertaining the masses, so I actually would expect people of that time (including farmers, not sure why you chose servants, unless you see the past through the lens of the rich, and have a blindness to the lives of commoners), to have access to art as well, but obviously more in line with the wealth levels and population density of the time.
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The evidence is so overwhelming that a scientific study is not even necessary. It's like observing that men are genetically predisposed to being taller than women.
This strikes me as an isolated demand for rigor. Would you apply the same standards to the claim that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer?
No, because the consequences of getting it wrong are very different.
If a society believes that smoking causes cancer, and they are wrong, some people don't get to enjoy setting fire to foul-smelling leaves and covering their walls and furniture with discusting gunk.
If a society believes that Black people are less intelligent and more criminal, and they are wrong, millions of innocent people go through their lives with a boot stamping on their faces.
Only if you subscribe to modern liberalism. Its perfectly fine to accept race differences without being compelled to subjugate people under classical liberalism. Lincoln, an abolitionist, fiercely believed in black inferiority. He had some creative solutions, such as deportation of many back to Africa, which probably would have worked decently for mainland America.
But there need not be drastic measures. American blacks could merely be treated equally, with the same expectations as everyone else, and it would dramatically improve things here. Of course, the backlash would be immense, as blacks treat equal treatment as oppression.
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So I have made an argument similar to this (but notably, not the same) and gotten heat for it, so allow me to say that I agree with those who are pointing out that truth should not depend on the social consequences. If something is true, even if that truth is hard, uncomfortable, and leads to unfortunate implications, that doesn't make it not true and you cannot demand people pretend that it is.
What you can demand is that we be very sure of it, and that we exercise extreme caution when deciding what to do about it. Which would be the steelman of what what you seem to be saying. What I was accused of was defending the "Noble Lie" (i.e., "We all collectively understand this is true but we must pretend we don't know it"). Which is not something I defend.
Where I differ from you is that you seem pretty set on "It would be so bad if this was true, that we must demand absolute 100% certainty, on the level of knowing that gravity exists, before we acknowledge it."
I don't agree that recognizing that there are racial differences in IQ and behavior would inevitably lead to racial oppression. I do agree that would be a risk. What I think it would lead to is some really hard choices and a lot of people unable to accept public policy that stops trying to "correct" a situation that is essentially not correctable. I don't know that we as a society could come to some sort of stable equilibrium where everyone is treated with dignity (and as an individual, not a demographic median!).
Nonetheless, I think we do still kind of need to know and face the truth.
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The problem is that if society believes the opposite of that, and they are wrong, then also millions of innocent people go through their lives with a boot stamping on their faces. There's no safe "false positives are clearly better/worse than false negatives" situation here that makes it easy to just err on one side. This is one of those legitimate Hard Problems that we need to actually do real scientific research to get right.
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Are you able to be a little more specific about how public policy would necessarily look if society believed that "[b]lack people are less intelligent and more criminal"?
To put it another way, what exactly do you mean by "millions of innocent people go through their lives with a boot stamping on their faces"? What exactly would happen to these people which is equivalent to having a boot [stomping] on their faces"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
Ok, so in your view, societal recognition that blacks are less intelligent and more criminal would necessarily lead to the reinstatement of racial segregation in the South.
Do I understand you correctly?
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Do you really expect that conclusive proof of the inferiority of blacks RE: IQ and crime would lead to the reinstation of such or similar laws, as if society hadn't changed at all since then?
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So that's what society is doing to the downies!
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Or would you apply the same rigor to the other question? That is, neither position is proven but which has more evidence. Why are privileging the blank slate hypothesis when it has for less evidence.
I don't privilege the blank slate hypothesis personally. My prior is somewhere in the spectrum between the suggested heredity from twin studies, and the suggested heredity from GWAS and GCTA for IQ and criminality.
I just think the HBD people here have a weirdly rigid view of biology. Like, sure, we would expect that as white and black environments become more similar, genetics becomes more important not less. I think there's a fair argument that black and white environment have become more similar in a lot ways, and so we should expect that we are starting to see more of the underlying genetic differences between the two groups, just as if we fed everyone the same 2000 calorie nutricube every day, we would expect the differences in height that result to be primarily due to genetics.
But I think a lot of "weird" stuff can hide in the remaining environmental differences between black and white people. Just as it would be slightly premature to say we have a handle on the genetic differences between rose cultivar A and rose cultivar B when we give them soil, sun and water conditions that are 80% similar, if the 20% of difference is a haphazard combination of pollutants, or uniformly more extreme weather conditions for one of the two cultivars.
Personally, I'm hoping it is genetic, because that would make the problem much more tractable. But I want to see the genes, and a proposed mechanism for how the genes work before I fully accept it. Of course, I will make Bayesian updates as we gather more data, but I think a lot of people update in inappropriately intense ways compared to the rigor of the evidence they are packing.
Could you be more specific? Are there any 'environmental' differences between Euro-Americans and Afro-Americans that aren't just a manifestation of the different IQ scores that blank slaters are trying to explain away?
What evidence are you waiting for? We already have polygenic risk scores for intelligence. We know that intelligence is mostly heritable, and that this doesn't differ by race.
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If the only thing that could convince you is literal sci-fi technology, why are you doing the "it worked for the Irish" bit, then? That argument certainly doesn't meet the standard that you put upon people who disagree with you, so it should be rejected on similar grounds.
The bad news would have been that we've spent an inordinate amount of time and resources victim-blaming, and excluding people out of public life, for not enthusiastically hopping on the current race-equality bandwagon. This is why I asked who will be held accountable for it, it's not something we can gloss over with "teehee, I guess it doesn't matter now".
By that metric, there's nothing special about New York. I'm not buying a ticket to watch any of the stuff they make there, there's more than enough local artists I can enjoy. Even in the US a trip to the city scarcely seems worth the bother, and the city's impact on the rest of the culture is dwindling.
The metric of IQ was invented in 1905. Around the 1970's we measured Irish IQ, and it seemed low. In the late 1980's Ireland became a banking hub and in the decades that followed we measured their IQ's and they weren't low. Those are the facts as I roughly understand them, without causal links added.
I do agree that the banking hub explanation is only one possible explanation for the observed changes in IQ. It's not as certain as the conservation of momentum, to be sure. It is just a balance of probabilities.
We have seen Irish IQ go up to around the White European average. We have also seen black IQ go up, but it does not match White IQ (today it averages around 85 in the US.) I don't think we have definitive evidence that this is as high as it will ever go. I guess my question would be, would it surprise you if in 100 years, people with similar genetics to today's African Americans ended up having average IQ's that were equivalent to a 90 or a 95 today and no medical interventions were responsible for the measured rise in IQ? Would it surprise you if in 100 years the black murder rate fell 10%-20%? What about if the rise in IQ was larger, or the fall in the murder rate even greater? What do you consider unrealistic for us to observe in the future?
Sure. I was just defending American culture as a whole there. You were the one who said it was on life support.
My issue right now is that debating these facts seems a bit futile, because you explicitly said you wouldn't change your mind until we came up with an atomic-level simulation of society. Why shouldn't I hold you to the same standard?
I think you misinterpreted my statement, so I will try to make my position more clear.
I believe I have a decent layman's understanding of the study of genetics and life outcomes. I believe that IQ is genetic (though with some influence from environment), and I believe that groups could have different average IQ's due to a different prevalence of genes being common within those groups. All of that I am perfectly on board with.
However, I think we are still in a pretty primitive place when it comes to the relationship between DNA and life outcomes. We have a better understanding than the behaviorists (who were true blank slatists), or the era of single gene studies (which produced a lot of good insights, and also a lot of junk science with low-N studies that didn't have enough power to show anything statistically significant), but right now what we're doing is just genome-wide association studies with various life outcomes. And that is a powerful tool, because it means that we can narrow our search space tremendously when we are looking for causal explanations.
But even if we find candidate genes, they might not produce low IQ in so straightforward a way as, "the blueprint of your brain down to the DNA is just dumber." The most trivial example of this might be a causal story along the lines of:
Now, to be clear, I don't think that that causal story is true. But hopefully it helps illustrates that it kind of matters what a gene actually does, not just whether it correlates with life outcomes. If we do GWAS, and find that the genes related to black external physical features are correlated with less success in life or lower educational attainment, then that doesn't really tell us anything new (unless there are unexpected double effects, similar to the findings that people with red hair supposedly have less pain tolerance than people with other hair colors due to the red hair genes having other downstream effects.)
If I grant that low black IQ in the modern day is primarily explained by genetics, there's still a lot of hypotheses that need to be investigated for the how and why. For example, could any of the following be an explanation:
Hopefully with those illustrations it becomes clear why I was saying we would definitively know when we can fully simulate the environment. I am not resistant to a simple explanation like, "black people's brains are just structurally dumber across the board", but I don't think that's the "null hypothesis" even if we do rigorous, high-N GWAS studies and find some good candidate genes for black life outcomes in America. Once we find the genes, we have to explain how they are affecting IQ, and there is no law of the universe requiring it to be something as simple as Mendelian inheritance in peas.
It is possible we'll know with a high degree of confidence much sooner than that. I can be convinced without a full biological simulation that low black IQ is best explained by genes, and we know approximately what those genes are and what they are doing to cause lower IQ. But I don't think anyone has such an explanation yet. I would be happy to be pointed at the rigorously conducted studies that say otherwise, though. I'd rather believe what is true, than suspend my judgement awaiting a better explanation.
I'm sorry, but it hasn't.
My issue isn't with your particular reasons for not buying into the differences between groups being genetic, my issue is with your broad support for multiculturalism on the basis that it worked out fine with the Irish. I'm saying that your particular version of multiculturalism, liberalism, etc., requires at least as much evidence as you demand of HBD, and arguably more, since it's an actual set of policy prescriptions, not just an abstract theory explaining the performance of groups. It should also explain failure to integrate, despite explicit promises of future success, and again provide the same level of evidence that you demand of HBD that these explanations are correct. Otherwise, you are privileging your theories to the status of the null hypothesis, despite your assurances in the other comment that you don't.
Yeah, neither do I. I'm not even that much of a hardcore HBDer, I've repeatedly pushed back against blanket condemnation of racial groups, but I think your claim that HBDers are treating their theory as the null hypothesis is a strawman.
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‘ it’s ok you’re dead now, in the future these people will be 30% less likely to murder, still bout 40% more likely than everyone else ‘ is worse than anything I can imagine.
I was asking to get a sense of how people were thinking about the genetic proclivities of African Americans for IQ and criminality. Like, I'm willing to entertain that the difference is genetic, but just as I think that differences in genetics probably explain differences in sporting ability (say, height in basketball to name just one factor), and yet I also believe that a clone of Lebron James who was half-starved his whole life and kept in a dark cave with no human contact would not be a good basketball player, I also think it is reasonable to speculate that there might be environmental factors exacerbating whatever genetic differences are there.
For example, a quick search shows that the following vitamin deficiencies are common in African Americans: vitamin D (likely due to their darker skin), iron, vitamin B12, magnesium, and vitamin B2. Now, I don't have a causal story for how any of those interact with IQ or criminality, but if we imagine the US making an intervention similar to iodine in salt or vitamins A and D in milk, would it be totally crazy if that led to some positive outcomes for criminality?
I also think the focus on relative rates is a little silly. It would be one thing if every black person was a genetic monstrosity with a 50/50 chance of turning on you and killing you dead in the streets every time you encountered them, but because America has a relatively low murder rate (high for a rich developed country, but still lower than most of the developing world), the practical effect of a statement like "black people are around eight times more likely to commit murder than the rest of the US population on a per-capita basis" is that in a year like 2023 around 6,405 black Americans committed murder out of a population of 48.3 million black people (and most of their victims were other black people, so it's not like they're mostly making it everyone else's problem.)
That is, even if black criminality is 100% genetic, it cashes out to a level where we should still treat the remaining 99.99+% of blacks with a strong presumption that they are not murderers, if we want to be well-calibrated to the statistics. It would almost be hysterical to do otherwise. Certainly it is statistically illiterate to make a big deal out of such a tiny number of bad apples, even if it is relatively higher than other groups.
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