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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Perhaps a bit of a divergent, but the entire dilemma has led me to a larger question of how much of life success (in dating, in work, in school) amounts to hard work.

I think that while that is an interesting question, a better idea would be to see if it possible to measure the predilection for hard work in the same way that we can measure IQ - a "HWQ" or some kind of general "hard work" factor. Seeing just how heritable that factor would be, how it is distributed among races/social groups/class/gender/sex/ideology would be incredibly interesting, but I don't know if there's any actual literature on the subject yet.

I think you won't find HWQ (conscientousness?) to be the deciding factor in life success. If you don't have high IQ, high HWQ will make you a great cog in the machine, but a cog you will be until you die. You won't slide down the class totem pole, but you won't rise up either. Which is not bad at all if you've been born a PMC and terrible if you've been born a working poor.

Oh, I absolutely agree on that front - I don't believe that IQ itself is an unalloyed good, and it isn't like there'd be a single optimal value for HWQ either. A HWQ that was excessively high would absolutely cause problems, albeit different ones to if it was too low.

Ehh — plumbers make a good living. I am making the obvious American mistake of conflating class with wealth.

Plumbers may not be high class(and among the other skilled trades they are distinctly known for poor management of their personal lives and getting divorced a lot), but they live a pretty nice life.

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