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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35514 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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HENRICH's MIRRORS, KENYANS and invincible ignorance

Joseph Henrich, the Harvard professor of evolutionary biology who coined the term WIERD to describe Westerners, and wrote the book on the cultural differences between us and them recently went on Hanania's podcast where he insisted that the Kenyan advantage in running records was... purely a matter of cultural psychology. Having introduced the bizzare lengths to which knowledgeable Academics will go to lie about the most obvious things; and knowing that these taboos have been the sacred in the West for so long, I'd like to propose the possibility that even committed HBDers have only scratched the surface of how far biological differences may go.

With that in mind, let's consider the matter of Kenyan children and mirrors. What matter you may ask? Well, one that might prompt the following, again from Heinrich, et al.

"It is possible but unlikely that these children, up to 72 months of age, did not recognize themselves in the mirror. Although the data presented here do not directly address the question of why they did not show signs of self-oriented behavior, we speculate that these are false negative responses..."

You read that right, standard self recognition testing does not detect self recognition in Kenyan children, a whole three years after it does so in European toddlers, and who knows how much longer.

https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Journal%20of%20Cross-Cultural%20Psychology-2010-Broesch-%20Cultural%20Variations%20in%20Children's%20Mirror%20Self-Recognition.pdf

Now, you'll have noticed that a 5 years of age, even dumb children can be asked questions. Yet for some reason, the study in question shows no sign that these children were ever asked anything about what they saw. In fact the study makers decided to go for another round elsewhere, and leave it at that. Thousands of psychologists are aware of this study, it was even published in Scientific American, and yet no one has publically tried to run it again. If there is even the slightest possibility that this means what It might mean, we are talking about the most important replication attempt in modern history, and it's not even close.

If put on tape, this is the final shot in the HBD wars, and one which even the normiest normie can understand. Any takers? My own prediction is 20% non-recognition, 30% fraud, 20% innate psychological differences in responding to mirrors, and 30% abusive parenting.

How many of these kids grew up around mirrors? It seems like an obvious issue— if a kid has never seen a mirror he can’t be expected to recognize himself in one.

According to the abstract, another study shows Bedouin children with no mirror access having basically the same recognition rate as Israeli children with mirror access.

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