This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
When I discuss Critical Race Theory with leftists, I often make the point that, while I'd rather public schools not encourage students to speculate on the causes of racial disparities, I'd be amenable to a compromise where systemic racism is taught as one possibility, alongside cultural and biological explanations.
The response to this (when it's not an accusation of racism on my part) is that I'm just like the creationists who wanted their psuedoscience taught alongside evolution. This is kind of true, in that I am asking that ideas I like be taught alongside ones favored by the academic establishment. However, when you take social desirability out of the equation, HBD is more similar to evolution because it literally IS just applied evolution, and systemic racism/CRT/disparate impact/wokeness/social justice/anti-racism/whatever label we're using this week is analogous to creationism in that we have little direct evidence it exists, but we assume it must exist because the current state of affairs would make sense as its outcome, even though it would also make sense as the outcome of other processes.
I doubt that I'm the first person around these parts to say that the Pastafarian explanation for gravity (an invisible, non-corporeal Flying Spaghetti Monster physically pushes us onto the ground) has no less evidence supporting it than the woke explanation for half-Asian, half-white children having a mean IQ between that of Asians and that of whites (stereotype threat impacts them half as much).
I also doubt that I'm the first person around these parts to draw a comparison between creationists who acknowledge microevolution while denying Darwinism to leftists who acknowledge within-group heritability while denying between-group heritability.
However, a thought occurred to me today that frightened me, and my hope is that when I voice it, you will unanimously dismiss it as ridiculous, because if it's in any way true, then I'm going to be devastated.
What if the truth value of Darwinism had little, if anything, to do with its acceptance by the academic establishment, and the falsehood of intelligent design had little, if anything, to do with its rejection by the academic establishment? If truth was that important, we'd expect CRT to be seen as equivalent to creationism, but it's not.
You know the Schmitt meme about how all disputes can be reduced to friend vs. enemy? Well.. maybe that's what happened with the debate over evolution in public schools. Maybe evolution was pushed specifically because the religious right objected to it, and not because it was real. That evolution actually WAS real was incidental at best.
Promote evolution and CRT because they hurt the right. Eliminate intelligent design and HBD because they hurt the left. This is how a Schmittposter would describe what happened, and maybe that literally is what happened.
Please tell me I'm just mindkilled. I'm not being rhetorical here. I would find that reassuring.
I find myself going back and forth between "you've been mind-killed" and "IQ doesn't actually measure the thing that IQ fetishists like to pretend it does". I won't go so far as to say "IQ doesn't exist" but I do believe that an inclination towards academics is not the same thing as being smart or competent. I've had way too much first-hand experience with "switched on" boys from the hood and retards with advanced degrees from prestigious schools to buy either background as a reasonable proxy for intelligence.
Meanwhile the cynical bastard in my wants to believe that Id Pol is what people resort to when they are not secure in their own identity, which is why it's loudest advocates always seem to be some sort of sexual deviant (IE Gay, Trans, Furry, Pedo, Antinatalist, Etc...).
There's definitely a lot of IQ fetishism in the HBD community, but the basics are true. IQ measures academic potential, nothing more or less. Doesn't make people motivated, moral or wise. Does correlate well with low crime and high achievement, because our society uses academia as a status-sorting mechanism. But all that's circular, IQ measuring the ability to satisfy the social sorting mechanism makes IQ predicting social success pretty obvious.
It's certainly not the be-all and end-all of society, nor should it be. Put a high-IQ anti-racist in front of an urban scammer and see who leaves with whose money.
As to "loudest advocates", I have a theory. Any group of any sort is going to have a bell curve of usefulness to the group. Roughly half the people contribute, the other half consume. This is true of sports teams, national societies, knitting circles. The people making big noises about group membership are either those competing for leadership of the group, or the most marginal members. Makes sense if you think about it.
To put it in military terms, the guys wearing the garish, threatening veteran T-shirts are rarely the dudes who saw action.
This is a mechanism i hadnt really considered but once stated explicitly seems intuitive and obvious. Academics assign worth based on academic aptitude because academics like academics.
Good point
More options
Context Copy link
Do you think being smart or dumb is just a matter of academic potential with no other practical real-world effect? Or you, like Hlynka, think IQ doesn't really measure intelligence?
Not sure exactly what you're asking?
We can get into weird definitional debates about what exactly "intelligence" is. I would argue that it doesn't really matter, because intelligence is whatever the social sorting mechanism decides is intelligence, which is currently academic, and that's what IQ measures. We only fetishize IQ because it predicts one's potential to rise in society. That said, it's the best test we have of raw brainpower (however we define that), and I believe I am reading the science correctly to say that particularly the g-loaded parts of IQ tests seem to measure that pretty well. There are aspects of (arguably) intelligence, verbal, musical etc. that are correlated with IQ but not at all perfectly.
But as a great generality, for the layperson, I would say IQ = smart is probably close enough to be useful. Just so long as we don't presume that means IQ = not terribly flawed human beings with all the same problems as everyone else, just smarter. And obviously, intelligence in any valid measurement will have all sorts of real-world effects.
When you say "IQ measures academic potential, nothing more or less", you seem to be saying it doesn't have all sorts of real world effects that aren't mediated by academia. But it's clear to me that what the layman calls "smart" and "dumb" do have non-academic effects, as quips like "He's so dumb he couldn't pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel!" demonstrate. So my question was whether you were denying that, or denying whether IQ tests measured "smart" and "dumb". But it seems to be neither, so I'm not sure what you mean by "IQ measures academic potential, nothing more or less".
I also don't think (US or Western) society fetishizes IQ; in fact, it denies its importance, both theoretically and practically (e.g. in that the SAT is being de-emphasized and its ceiling has been lowered). It does fetishize academic achievement.
I didn't say it doesn't have real world effect, only that it is measuring something other than what is claimed.
I would also argue that the degree to which the Ivy league denies the importance of IQ and the SAT is directly proportional to the number of slots they see being as having been "stolen" from jews and wasps by chinks and niggers.
Asians, yes, that makes sense, but Black people benefit from dropping the SAT more than any other group.
White people conceivably benefit from the lowering of the ceiling of the SAT.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is this about IQ? IQ doesn't measure "inclination towards academics." The relationship is confounded by all sorts of things, like agreeableness and conscientiousness.
Good IQ tests are inductive reasoning problems that can be given to naked spear-wielding tribesmen in savage jungles who have never heard of a school or university, without cultural bias, because they are testing aptitude in cognitive skills that are (a) common across humans and (b) correlated with capacity for other cognitive skills. An Amazonian wild man might not be able to read, but we can estimate his ability to quickly learn to read based on his IQ score in pattern-recognition problems.
Yes. Im saying that i dont think IQ measures the thing IQ fetishists think it measures. IE intelligence. I think it measures academic aptitude.
I think that there is very little that is scientific about the social sciences and view your claims of what a "good iq test" does with extreme skepticism.
"Intelligence" is a very vague term. It's like asking "Do changes in price indexes measure inflation?" Well, the ordinary concept of inflation is vague, both in the sense that people often are unsure what they mean by it, and in the sense that different people use the term in different ways.
We can compare this with terms like "length", "temperature", or "weight", which are vague when taken out of their usual contexts (e.g. into the more alien parts of physics or into continuous mathematical spaces) but pretty clear in a particular context.
Since "intelligence" itself is vague and ill-defined, even in simple contexts, there is a case for thinking of IQ as what Rudolf Carnap called an "explication" of intelligence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explication#Carnap's_notion_of_explication
IQ matches a lot of things that we'd expect from general intelligence, such as the ability to learn concepts, manipulate relatively large numbers of abstractions at the same time, or solve familiar types of reasoning problems quickly. It also extends into applications where "intelligence" is too vague a notion, such as quantitative comparisons and predictions. However, since IQ has more precise content than "intelligence", it's wrong to say "IQ = intelligence".
Ok let's put it this way.
I have known people with ostensibly room temperature IQs who were simultaneously astute observers and efficient problem solvers. I have also known people who supposedly had IQs in the 150+ range who were effectively retarded and incapable of functioning without strict supervision.
From this one can draw at least one of two conclusions. either IQ tests are not nearly as reliable and universal as they claim to be. Or IQ is not measuring the thing its advocates like to claim it does.
Did you measure the IQs under controlled settings in either case?
No, I didn't, and it is readily apparent that the so called "social scientists" didn't either.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How could the ability to do Raven's matrices measure only "academic aptitude" and nothing to do with core mental processing power?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
An absurd and unsupported claim, as per usual. Focusing only on white identity advocates, I find prominent figures such as Jared Taylor, a devoted family man with, as far as I’m aware, a spotless personal reputation and no signs of deviance - sexual or otherwise - whatsoever. Ditto for Taylor’s star writer at American Renaissance, Gregory Hood, who lives in rural West Virginia with his very normal family. Ditto for Peter Brimelow, Henrik Palmgren, and scores of other identitarian figures I could name. Not a sexual deviant among them.
And then expanding out to prominent black identitarian figures, I find guys like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, who, despite any of the negative things I can say about them, are similarly devoted family men with normal wives and normal sex lives, as far as I’m aware. You can, of course, nut-pick the weirdoes and deviants in any movement - many here would gleefully oblige if asked for example of “Trad-Con” luminaries who have turned out to have scandalous secret sex lives - but I think an unbiased observer would find your claim mostly unsupported.
They must not be that loud if I've never heard of them.
Or…. have you considered that you might just be completely out of touch with the movement that you comment on constantly? Like, you claim to have interesting things to say about white identitarians, and yet you don’t know who Jared Taylor is? The guy who used to routinely be invited on mainstream news programs to discuss white advocacy? And you don’t know who Coates and Kendi are? I’m sorry, but it’s difficult to take seriously your commentary on this issue when you constantly demonstrate that you lack familiarity with a lot of the figures and issues involved.
I considered it and dismissed it as inconsequential as I had specifically called out "loudest advocates" IE those who someone who is not closely following the movement could be reasonably expected to be familiar with.
First off, two of the men I named - Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi - are massively influential authors and commentators, both of whom have been lavished with money, praise, attention, and a cultural megaphone by both public and private power centers. The white nationalist guys I named, with the exception of Hood and Palmgren, were all recognizable to the general public for at least a decade and, as I mentioned, used to be invited on mainstream news programs and have their books reviewed by mainstream publications. These are not obscure figures.
More importantly, though, none of that is even relevant, because you do claim to be familiar with the movement. You’re constantly banging on about how you understand the true psychology of identitarians, how you’ve figured us out and you understand us better than we understand ourselves. You have your big Unified Horseshoe Theory of Identity Politics, which for some reason certain people here take seriously. Yet whenever you’re pressed to actually defend specific claims you make about specific individuals or their ideas, you retreat to mumbling or claim that you’re just a normal guy who can’t be expected to keep track of the specifics of a movement you’re not a part of. Well, okay, it’s fine that you don’t know who Jared Taylor is, but it ought to make it pretty tough for anyone to take you seriously the next time you start spouting off about how all identitarians are an undifferentiated mass.
Of course, I have. Afterall the only place I really interact with race-essentialists on a regular basis is here on the theMotte, which is why I made a point to specify "the loudest" (IE the people who actually make enough noise to be recognized outside identitarian circles) and not some other metric like "most popular" or "most influential".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
He's asking whether or not he's mind-killed because he thinks the Blues were in favor of teaching evolution because it benefitted them politically, rather than because they thought it's true. Is that what you're agreeing with, or are you focusing on HBD?
More options
Context Copy link
You seem to think that HBD is silly, but also that the claim that differences in outcome between groups are primarily caused by oppression is silly. And that's fine! My point is that the strong preference in polite society for one over the other is hard to reconcile with evolution being similarly preferred over intelligent design unless one takes the Schmittpill.
("Preferred" is putting it mildly, since we're talking bans and blacklisting, but I'm too tired to think of a better word.)
I do and I do, because I believe that the primary driver of differences in outcome between groups is cultural. "My daddy taught me X" (or failed to teach me X) may be hereditary, but it is not genetic. Accordingly, the HBD-Tards stated preference for politeness is a trap, there trying to convince honest actors to play nice while they play dirty.
It seems to me like most things a single variable explanation is incomplete but also that one explanation can in fact enforce another.
For example, why do some cultures promote X and not Y? Some of it is explained by historical events which was influenced by geography and resources. But culture was also surely influenced by the people themselves which includes hereditary genes. But at the same time, culture influences which genes are passed on (because culture influences which males successfully reproduce) therefore strengthening the relationship between culture and genes.
More options
Context Copy link
This is very difficult to believe for those of us who taught ourselves out of being in one cultural domain and into another, and we're able to do so for reasons of either intrinsic capabilities or pure random chance.
Define what you mean by "cultural domain" in this context
Cultural environment that encompasses a class. Underclass, working class, middle class, educated middle class, professionals, upper middle class all have vastly differing cultural environments and changing between them is possible - while changing your class fundamentally is not, due to the impossibility of changing the past, but you can pass and learn things that you aren't taught by your parents or those ein your environment, things you learn by yourself due to your intrinsic ability and inclination.
You realize that this implies an internal locus of control and thus falsifies a good chunk of the bio-determinists so called evidence do you not?
Internal locus of control doesn't refute biological influences on distributions of likely and possible outcomes over a population in aggregate.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I also suspect that this is true, but it doesn't require scepticism about IQ or even not thinking that hereditary IQ is a major determinant of academic or commercial success at an individual level. A large part of group differences is not statistically explained, and many explanatory factors (like agreeableness and conscientiousness) have a cultural aspect to them.
Of course, a HBD theorist might say that cultural differences are themselves largely genetic in origin, but I would want to look at twin studies, adoptee studies, and similar evidence before believing that.
That would be an argument against genetic determinism rather than in favor. Thus undermining the wider HBD position.
Yes, my point is that scepticism about HBD doesn't require scepticism about IQ, scepticism about IQ being largely (or even mostly) genetically determined, or scepticism about IQ being an important factor in life outcomes.
And my point is that my skepticism of HBD largely stems from my skepticism of IQ. Like I said above, I've had too much first-hand experience with both ends of the bell curve to buy that IQ is anything more than a very loose proxy for actual intelligence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Knock it off with "HBD-Tards."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link