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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33488 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Low effort but CW so it goes here. Its the end of the week anyways.

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/115vdud/looking_for_recommendations_on_sources_for_why/

It seems to me the slatestarcodex subreddit has been fully normified. Of all those comments only 1 mention (hint) of group average IQ on why sub saharan Africa is poor??

Then theres the "woah how did you get here, you dont belong here" as a response to the guy who hinted at IQ. Does that guy even know whose blog he is in the subreddit of.

All I am saying is for those of you who still say /r/ssc is "smart", update your priors, this post is not an isolated case.

E: Ill remove if consensus building.

For context, OP (Matt Lakeman) is an old ex-regular who has an amazing blog dedicated mostly to international travel, reading on historical stuff and self-experiments. He's been to the Dominican Republic, among other places. He was not impressed. As one can expect, there's a section on the Haiti, with passages like:

Haiti was my first destination choice for this trip. But when I Googled “Haiti,” the top news story was about 17 American and Canadian missionaries being kidnapped by a Haitian gang and held for $17 million ransom. So I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to go to Haiti at the moment.

I don’t know why the two countries have diverged so dramatically. Noah Smith says no one knows the cause of the split, but it’s probably some combination of Haiti starting its independence with enormous national debt (as part of a settlement with former colonial master France), terrible land management policies, the ongoing toll of the U.S. occupation for twenty years (the Dominican Republic was invaded too, but only for eight years), constant regime change, and generally abysmal macroeconomic policy. One Dominican I talked to attributed the country’s success to mid-century dictator Rafel Truillo, who was authoritarian and oppressive (and renamed the capital after himself), but allegedly brought enough order to the country to attract foreign investment and jump start the modern tourist economy. Also, for geographic/climate reasons, Haiti gets hit far more and far harder by natural disasters than the Dominican Republic.

By chance, I spent some time with two European aid workers stationed in Haiti. Their strong consensus was that Haiti was even worse than I had imagined. Worse than anyone imagines. And it has no viable recovery plan. A few interesting things they told me:

[...]

Law and order is non-existent in the cities. There is no point in reporting crimes. The cities are essentially in a state of anarchy.

The lawlessness has gotten worse over the last few years. The two used to be able to go to restaurants and jazz clubs, but now they don’t leave their homes at night.

Taxes are not paid in Haiti (duh). But if for some reason someone wants to pay taxes in Haiti, they first have to bribe the security guards at the doors of the tax offices.

When the Haitian people get pissed off at the government, their only viable means of protest is to block roads. So they’ll cut down trees or light tires on fire and cut off major highways. There is literally no process in place for the Haitian government to clear these blockages.

The Haitian people are consumed by “fake news.” Rival political factions run radio stations and Whatsapp groups, and spread fake news to vilify the opposition and/or foreigners. The fake news is so rampant that the average Haitian seems to have a completely deluded view of politics and the world at large.

It's a mystery indeed!

By the way, Scott's trip to Haiti was what opened his eyes to biodeterminism. (this reminds me of that old text of a guy who became racist after going on a humanitarian mission to Africa, there was an incredibly parable-like bit where he helped some local set up a food stall with baked bread, but his relative came and said «you have bread! My family needs bread!», took everything – you can't deny your family – so the guy went bankrupt and never did business again; lost it again and search engines are... uncooperative). Maybe Matt should've gone after all and written something in his usual manner.

...But also.

IQ is not a mechanistic explanation. All the politically correct stuff he asks about – governments, [inability to make use of] climate, culture – are in the end products of IQ but can be studied separately. IQ only tells us why it's so inescapably and consistently bad. But then an informed person would ask: why is Russia or Ukraine or Belarus like that? Why is China like that? Why is Iran like that? Sure it's not Sub-Saharan Africa, but aren't these people clearly smart enough to at least do better than what they show? And why are they worse than, like, Portugal? So IQ can't be the full story; and so long as this is the case, one has enough wiggle room to not notice the elephant.

As I've just argued, tabooing HBD destroys a great deal more than understanding of stuff that pertains directly to HBD. It lowers the effective IQ of the group, and much faster than dysgenics. Regarding the normiefication of the sub, you're obviously correct, but barely-challenged mentions of Jared Diamond, who is an utter fraud and a just-so storyteller, are even more telling. AskHistorians link is okay. Here's a good discussion of his GGS by that Russian biologist who wrote a Tolkien fanfic from Mordor's perspective, if anyone is interested, I can... proofread Deepl/ChatGPT translation.

I remain skeptical.

Since you are clearly aware of Jensen's answers on the matter and perhaps of this issue's discussion in e.g. Wade's Facts that need to be explained– how do you figure skepticism is a tenable position? Sure, maybe the genotypic potential of those Sub-Saharans isn't in the 50s or even low 70s like Lynn et all argue, maybe they'd get to 80's with a proper societal infrastructure (which is to say, under a regime they themselves fail to establish). I personally buy that at those low levels, in conditions of scarcity, every minor institutional slip-up can lead to compounding loss on the environmental side: they dumber you are, the more you fail, and the more you fail, the lower your IQ goes, so equilibriums of underperformance of groups separated by a few genotypic points may be more than an SD apart. Okay.

But we have a great control case in the form of American Yoruba-White mixed population, that displays differences which map perfectly onto the HBD framework . Unless one takes seriously the hypothesis that systemic American racism/Black culture degrades environmental conditions of affected American children to the level of a third world nation, in a manner that is resistant to adoptions, educational interventions and so on, and allows some to become billionaires and public darlings and political figures, but exclusively through sports and entertainment and never anything recruiting the extreme right tail of the distribution for legible tasks (and so on, and so on, and so on) – it seems inevitable that HBD explains at least a great chunk of the disparity. I won't even discuss that we've had some progress on education PGS delta since then, because obviously those results are easy to suspect as being underpowered. But... it's really hard to see how HBD could not have a substantial effect.

Even if they simply show more abstract failures like difficulties with planning, at the scale of a ten-year-old's type of planning, this should show up pretty quickly during normal conversation. But for the model to be true, the actual matter has to be yet more abstract still: Equatorial Guinea has more than its fair share of problems and corruption and lackluster decisions, but they're not The Three Stooges.

Have you spoken to a functional adult person who tested below 70? My impression of Haiti stories is that they really have next to no rigorous abstract thinking but have otherwise healthy nervous systems – as would follow from the conjecture that White/Asian IQ advantage is a product or relatively recent selection and not-as-smart but functional peoples have existed and survived in the wild for a long time. They talk like... rather dim but normal people I know. And not to dehumanize anyone, but it doesn't surprise you that animals with literally zero ability to take an IQ test or have their g measured orient themselves in space well enough, does it?

Having dealt with actual working class blacks, they do seem to have cultural habits that plausibly suppress IQ(generally poor nutrition by first world standards, notably, as well as high rates of recreational drug use and injuries). I’m not doubting that there’s an HBD component to their underperformance, but more socially functional African Americans would probably have an IQ above 85, albeit still lower than whites by a noticeable amount.

more socially functional African Americans would probably have an IQ above 85, albeit still lower than whites by a noticeable amount

These are also much more likely to have higher proportions of white genetics.

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