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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3326 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 26, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Another HBD question(the motte's favorite topic). What is the reason for higher north-east Asian IQ? Europeans and Ashkenazi Jews and Brahmins all have plausible enough explanations, but my understanding is that the hajnal line doesn't cover east Asia and that most inhabitants there were rice farmers for thousands upon thousands of years, not scholars.

Me.

I think there’s a correct motte; the topic is raised overwhelmingly by people interested in the bailey.

"It has not been conclusively ruled out" is as far as I'm willing to go in terms of supporting it. I think the role of culture is underestimated.

Yes.

But what can you do with that information

Refute the presumption that difference in outcome is evidence of discrimination.

Would it be a better world on net?

As stated above: no one can answer that.

But, let's say it wasn't: should we necessarily care? If you're the guy missing out on university and job placements and harangued for keeping the blacks (but not the Asians somehow) down, you may just want it over with and fuck the world (who honestly cares about "the world on net" in any serious way besides EA-types tbh?)

I dislike utilitarians in large part because of this very line of thinking. Those questions are far too hard to answer. You presume to know the answer, that the world would necessarily be worse, and then use that assumption to justify elite control.

In deontology, there is no justifying or downplaying the noble lie. In utilitarianism there is. That is the difference.

More broadly, you can permit evil so long as you think it'll work out in the end. Dangerous way to think when predicting the future is as hard as it is.

A world in which we do not conspire to lie to people for political purposes. If it's not okay for the CDC or WHO to lie to the public about facemasks or vaccines in the context of COVID because they think they know what's good for us, why should it be okay for them to lie to us about heredity? If we don't trust people with the truth, then why have a democracy at all?

Individuals learn to deal with the fact that they are too short to play in the NBA or not smart enough to win a Nobel prize in physics. Inhabitants of small countries learn to deal with the fact that they will never be a great power and need to play the game of geopolitics more wisely than superpowers that can blunder from one mistake to the next with few consequences. We all must come to terms with our own mortality. I don't see how this is any different, and in fact it may not even need to be an eternal truth if we invest in embryo selection technology.

I tend to believe it's nowhere near as false as blank-slaters would like, and not as true as HBDers would like.

I think my own take is a little different--HBDers are correct on the facts, but then seem to conclude that genetic factors are immune to policy, which I do not believe. Is intelligence determined by some combination of genes and environment/nature and nurture/etc.? Yes, certainly. However, I don't think you can split the influences into "X% this, Y% that," because the factors are not distinct--they heavily influence each other over time, to the point that they cannot be disentangled.

Tracing out one example--the impact of culture. Culture is obviously not itself genetic, though it is inherited. At a minimum, a culture contains some priority scale of values, and grants status to those who better exemplify the values emphasized. Higher cultural status is very directly linked to success in procreation, which means that later generations will be more populated by those who achieve more cultural success in earlier generations.

If you have a culture that highly values communicative creativity, then you'll get more competitive wit, wordplay, and language skills that tolerate more complexity in exchange for finer-grained precision in description. Those who perform well generate more of the next generation, which will have more skill at symbol-manipulation on average than previous. If this emphasis persists, the culture will itself evolve to handle an increased number of poets...and lawyers. The impact cycles back and forth between cultural success generating genetic success, which influences cultural evolution that modifies the definition of cultural success, and so on.

There are also multiple success and failure modes for a given population, as well. A culture that presents multiple high-priority values that exist in some natural tension with each other may find itself less subject to culturally-influenced genetic drift, and therefore more stable over time. Whether this is a success or failure mode depends on the surrounding circumstances--is there a need for more rapid adaptation? A population may find itself in a sociological niche that favors specialization, and can become distinct from nearby genetically separate populations remarkably rapidly. (If a clan is told, "you guys are all blacksmiths now, and we're paying a lot for the best swords," I'm going to expect the great-great-grandkids to have unusually developed upper-body musculature, and probably pretty decent heat-tolerance.) Or a culture may decide to pick super-hardmode, and deprioritize procreation as a value. The hedonic draw of sex isn't enough to guarantee replacement-rate fertility; cultural support is necessary.

Tl;dr: 'natural' selection is culturally mediated.

If a clan is told, "you guys are all worthless, and we're not expecting anything of value from you before you're 30" I'm going to expect the great-great-grandkids at 20 to be unusually underdeveloped, and probably pretty low in general maturity.

I take it one step further and claim this holds across populations, too.

Sure, very likely. The point I was trying to set up with my toy blacksmith example was not just a population group being shoved into a niche ("you're all blacksmiths now") but also that the group had a motivation to lean into the niche ("paying a lot for the best swords"). If a group highly values excellence in a particular area, then individual excellence in that area should be a correspondingly strong status boost.

In your phrasing, crushing status plausibly should lead to lower average performance, but you'd still likely see internal measures of status within the group, emigrants that seek status elsewhere, or other reactions.

I second this. HBDers seem to almost entirely dismiss culture and nurture as factors in IQ. They aren't the only factors, genetics are important too, but they aren't inconsequential.

Yeah, I don't believe HBD at all. I'm not really open to discussion on it though (hence why I don't discuss it or even announce my position normally).

I’m in the “95% culture, 5% genes” column.

Cold winters, The hajnal line has far more to do with individualism than it does IQ.

Compared to neighboring mongolia or siberia, IQ is much higher while winters are much milder.

IQ is very helpful when a group of farmers needs to anually plan ahead to have enough food to survive the winter. They can weigh the grain and develop a plan for food shortages ahead of time (eg try to stock up on salt fish, dig up any edible plant roots, flee south). Invaders probably aren't going to come in and harvest all of your grain. Typically it's possible to hide the harvest for the winter if it's at risk.

There's usually a certain coldness in those societies -- if your neighbors keep starving due to their own mistakes it's tempting to just let them die instead of risking your family to save them.

Mongolia's history is much more pastoral. There's a lot of investment in each animal. Invaders stealing animals is common. So survival is more random. Saving your dumb cousin is worthwhile if he's willing to fight to the death to save your animals.

Generally in sub-saharn Africa planning is difficult because the threats are more random. Food is more available in the winter / dry season. The big risks are random events -- invasion, disease, megafauna eating your crops, predators eating your people. If you have a food shortage it's probably local so trading or invading your neighbors are options.

Obviously Africa is a big place and there are exceptions to the usual threats, eg Ukara Island. I'm not aware of any IQ surveys that refect that.

In extremely cold places different survival strategies emerge. The Inuit / Eskimos are pure hunters for the winter and their society focusses heavily on conformity since sharing kills is crucial.

There's also the cube square law. Larger heads get overheated more easily in hot climates.

Siberians, Mongolians and Inuits can be handwaved away by saying nomadic pastoralism cancels out the benefits of living in a cold climate.

I quibble a bit with the "much higher" here. The starting point for Northeast Asians was already quite high.

It's quite interesting that Yakuts have similar IQ scores to Ethnic Russians- most indigenous groups aren't. And it does appear that badly developed and terrible countries in the general vicinity have oddly high IQs compared to similar countries. That significantly changes my priors on the cold winters hypothesis.

The explanation I have read is that the equal division of property under Chinese inheritance law combined with higher birthrates among wealthier and presumably more capable farmers led to a trickle-down effect analogous to Gregory Clark's argument for the English gentry in A Farewell to Alms. Pressure to succeed on the Imperial Civil Service Exams may have been another factor, but only affected a small part of the population.

Does this apply in Japan and Korea, as well? The argument from different inheritance law seems plausible, but any explanation has to cover China, Japan, and Korea because all have elevated IQs.

Both copied their institutions more or less directly from China after this system was already established, as did Vietnam, so my guess would be yes.

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