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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   19111 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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I believe that's only true of ADOS, who are functionally a different ethnicity and demographic to modern African migrants. First and second-generation African migrants today are very different and have assimilated more successfully.

This fails the test of high filtration. I do in fact have highly assimilated black ADOS friends. But it’s a small % of the population. The last cycle of African immigrants to the US were highly filtered.

The closest thing we have to unfiltered African population in America would be Somalis and they are not assimilating. And Europe is having similar issues with unfiltered African migration.

The only examples we have of mass migration in the west completely failed to assimilate over 100’s of years.

Sorry, I should have specified - recent African migrants to the United States. The European situation is different.

I agree that those migrants are heavily filtered. That's the point. It's like Indian migration to the US. You can selectively take motivated, educated, high-achieving migrants. The same thing with Asian migration, actually.

Yes but children regress to the mean somewhat even with highly-filtered parents, chain migration is going to be something that gets lobbied for exhaustively and without end and is closer to unfiltered. There's also a certain social effect where the children of people who had top 1% outcomes in life to get out of Bumfuckistan and get to the West, even if intelligent, will fall short of parental accomplishments/expectation and then blame it on Racism instead of recognizing their parental achievement.

This is particularly exacerbated in a decent amount of groups where the family that chose to remain in the country of origin are actually doing pretty damned well (since they're top 1%ers intelligence-wise in an emerging economy, a lot of which have gone gangbusters especially if you are in that 1%) and thus look back at their cousins who are still at home and see they've got insane luxury lifestyles whilst their parents choosing to bail on Bumfuckistan has earned them, the children, an upper middle class lifestyle. I grew up with a lot of Asian diaspora Western-born first generation immigrants where this theme came up a lot, where their parents looked like a genius fleeing Vietnam circa 1960 and yet circa 2020 the family (that was upper echelon enough to get the people that left the resources and education to leave) back home are 9-figure millionaires whilst the emigrant is a Doctor.

Then inevitably a torrent of bitching about 'wah my cousins all get random do-nothing sinecures and drive Lamborghinis around all day, it's the rice ceiling keeping me down in the West' when they should have just stayed in the initial country where they were of the upper crust.

children regress to the mean somewhat even with highly-filtered parents

If you select a subpopulation from a population, the children of the subpopulation will regress to the mean of the subpopulation, not the entire population.

Depends if the outperformance of the subpopulation is down to them being a subpopulation with a higher mean or if it's due to them simply being out on the far point of the curve for the greater population.

I don't understand. If they're all "out on the far point of the curve for the greater population", doesn't that imply they have a higher mean?

It depends, doesn't it?

If you filter a normally distributed population and find somebody who's 3 standard deviations away from the mean, it doesn't necessarily implicitly follow that they're of a unique subpopulation with a higher mean. They could just be an outlier.

It does mean exactly that. A subpopulation with that one individual will have a mean equal to that individual's value. A subpopulation with one individual 3 SD above the mean and one 2 SD above the mean will have a mean of 2.5 SD above the mean. And so on when adding more individuals.

This is assuming the datapoints are simple numbers. Are you aiming for some kind of more complicated causal process?

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