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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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What's not compelling about the standard narrative of familiarity and education overcoming irrational, subconscious bias? (Though I apologize for wasting space if you were specifically trying to poll people who don't buy this narrative, just felt weird that no comments except the very bottom two seem to touch on it.) People have a very strong subconscious bias against the weird and unusual. People of a different race went from very obviously looking like nothing you've ever seen before to common familiarities in the street and on TV. Furthermore, education levels increased, giving more people the ability to overcome incorrect biases in their thinking. Once everyone realized that other races were 99.99% the same kind of humans, acceptance immediately followed.

I would even add another layer to this. In the past, following this same-race bias wasn't very costly. Excluding the one or two different-race/ethnicity/culture people you ever see from your group doesn't really matter. People used to be basically replaceable as far as skills and ability to contribute---one farmer or pre-modern or soldier isn't going to be dramatically different from any other. However, for whatever reason, this has completely changed in the modern day and some people have special skills that let them contribute an absurdly disproportionate amount. By the 20th century, excluding, for example, someone like von Neumann or Einstein because they're Jewish makes your civilization lose out and be destroyed.

The difference is even worse now---in all the most important fields that make a civilization powerful, the top performers contribute just so much more than the average performer. You really cannot exclude the 100x programmers/scientists/entrepreneurs because of their race---they are just too rare and too important. Non-acceptance of different races is just untenably for a society and any costs of cultural inhomogeneity pale in comparison. Literally, judge people by the content of their character (i.e. skills and abilities) instead of the color of their skin or be outcompeted and die.

Of course prevailing views always lag practical pressures by a bit, but it really should not be surprising that attitudes changed so much.

That’s an argument for not discriminating against groups that have a reasonable chance of producing 100x people. As stated, it requires a heavy dose of blank slatism on top.

As stated, it requires a heavy dose of blank slatism on top.

I don't think this is at all true. It requires a much weaker claim than blank-slatism: simply that non-whites are capable of being these 100x contributers. As long as the relative fraction isn't so extreme that like 80-90% of top-level talent is white even though whites are a much smaller percentage of the world population, then there are still serious costs for excluding non-whites. I've never seen HBD claims this strong---probably because they're patently ridiculous if you look at, for example, what the US IMO team looks like, the demographics of difficult STEM classes at elite universities or workers at tech companies, etc.

Of course, as asked by @aardvark3, this isn't the group that you guys are usually interested in discussing, though I note that the original post was only about the acceptance of any non-whites at all. Even in this case, saying something like there are almost no prominent black scientists is just false---this is the the strength of claim you would have to show for the argument not to apply. (Asking for von Neumann-tier is very unfair because there are only a few people of that tier a century---you can plausibly argue that he's literally the only example, so trivially no ethnic group except his own reaches that bar.) Whatever differences might appear between groups are dominated by differences within a group---I think even the strongest HBD positions accept this. Therefore and at the very least, the right specially selected subset of any racial group will always be very beneficial to accept.

Asking for von Neumann-tier is very unfair because there are only a few people of that tier a century

You literally introduced "someone like von Neumann or Einstein" into the conversation.

Whatever differences might appear between groups are dominated by differences within a group

No. Esitimates for Ashkenazi Jews: average IQ = 110 and SD=15. African Americans IQ = 85 and SD =15. And that's not even taking pygmies or Australian Aborigines, who have even lower IQs.