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Notes -
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.
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.
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.)
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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