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Inferential Distance: part 4 of ? Do You Think That's Air You're Breathing?
This post is an installment of an ongoing series.
Part 1: Knowing Right from Left
Part 2: Minsky's Marvelous Minutia, why I'm bearish on AI
Part 3: Not So Special Agents
@DaseindustriesLtd writes...
...and to be fair, he and I have been going back and forth enough for long enough that I genuinely feel like I owe them an honest explanation. The short answer is that I am a genuine believer in this sub's core premise IE that "engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time". The long answer is to follow...
Long time readers will know that I've been going on for years about that Star Trek TNG episode Darmok and Jalad. For those unfamiliar, the premise and core conflict of the episode is summarized in this scene here. The idea being that without a shared narrative or frame of reference communication becomes difficult if not impossible. As observed by Dr Crusher, the image of "Julliet on her Balcony" would mean little to someone who has never been exposed to the works of Shakespear. An alternative for those more academically inclined might be to consider Wittgenstein's "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him". Long story short I actually agree with Wittgenstein here, but I also think that this is an obstacle that can be overcome and if anything, overcoming that obstacle is what this whole series is about.
As such, If you really want to understand what I'm doing here I urge you to watch Fight Club and The Matrix. These two movies were released about 6 months apart and came along at a very strange time in my life. My user-name "HlynkaCG" is, among other things, an obscure Fight Club reference. Hlynka/Hilinka being the Czech word for quicklime and a surname associated with makers of soap. These days the name is more closely associated with hockey but that too feels appropriate as an online "fighting nam". (See the old joke about going to a fight only for a hockey game to break out) In any case, being fresh out of high-school and just starting to realize that the vision that I had been harboring of my future was not going to come to pass, these films left me feeling "seen" in a way that I hadn't since I was a small child. This scene in particular had a profound effect on my outlook in life and it is one that I still find myself reflecting upon and seeing in new light over two decades later.
The extreme degree to which the modern secular mindset tries to insulate itself from the simple universalities of life and death is one of those things that I had never noticed it until it was pointed out to me, but once it had, I found it impossible not to notice. Every subtle (and not so subtle) "nudge" to accrue debt, consume [product], and engage with [latest thing], all seemed to come back to this impulse. The impulse to turn away from life. The Sheeple/NPC meme is rightly derided, especially when it's some angst riddled 19-20 year-old pushing it, but it feflected my sincere feelings at the time. I just couldn't understand how so many people could miss what now seemed so obvious to me. Could they not see where this path leads? Do those Raging Against the Machine not recognize that they themselves are part of it, that their whole existence depends on it?
Enter The Matrix.
I'm a huge fan of The Matrix, I'm even a fan of it's sequels. It is easily one of my favorite series. I'm not going to describe it as underrated or underappreciated because it's not. It was massively influential across multiple domains and basically set the tone of the early 2000s and 2010s. That said I do feel like it's often underestimated. There seem to be an endless stream blogposts and YouTube videos arguing something to the effect of "the Matrix is a lot smarter than you remember" or "the Matrix is a lot smarter than you remember" and they're both correct to some degree. The important and "underestimated" part in my eyes (and in the context of this post) is that the Matrix by presenting us with a narrative it provides the vocabulary needed to discuss a deep inferential gulf. the "red pill", the "blue pill", "cipher's speech", "freeing one's mind", No one can be told what the matrix is, you have to see it for yourself.
So to finally get to the meat of @DaseindustriesLtd's question, let's adress with the elephant in the room.
Identity politics is bullshit.
To be clear, I'm not saying that I don't like it, or that I disagree with it's policy proscriptions. I'm saying that it's bullshit, all of it. Identity politics is a load of incoherant post-modernist nonsense that actively diminishes an individual's ability to understand basic human psychology/behaviors and make accurate predictions about the world. In short, identity politics makes people stupider. It makes people stupid because as with a lot of other post-modernist academic fads it gets cause and effect, source and sink, exactly backwards.
Marcus Aurelius admonishes us to look upon each particular thing and ask what is it's nature? IE what does it do? where does it come from? How does it behave? The answers you get are what that thing is. Scott wrote about this idea at length in The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories but veared away from the what ought to have been the logical conclusion at the last moment rather face it squarely. Identity, to the degree that it represents something meaningful and real, exists for the benefit of the identifier rather than the identified. Dylan Mulvaney can identify as woman all he likes but it but it wont make him a biological female any more than my identfying as a LGM-118 Peacekeeper Missile means that the US government must report on my movements in accordance with the START treaty.
Dase asks from whence "my predeliction" comes, and my reply is whether someone identifies as a progressive or expresses loathing towards "the woke" is not the point. The point is how do they behave? what beliefs do they espouse? and where do they come from? My position is that somebody who behaves like a progressive, comes from a progressive background, and who argues progressive talking points, is for all practical intents and purposes a progressive regardless of how they might identify. Identity exists for the benefit of the identifier rather than the identified.
Which brings us back to the Matrix. The reason that various flavors of failed progressive seem to gravitate towards an ideology resembling early-mid 20th century fascism (as opposed to some flavor of conservatism) is that fascism is a fundamentally progressive ideology. They might take the red pill but they never manage to free thier minds. They want to continue believing that the world runs on inductive logic when any game involving multiple agents is going to be anti-inductive. They want to quibble some group's position within the intersectional stack rather than question the validity of the stack as a concept. They cling to psuedo-marxist nonsense about group/class consciousness and group/class differences to salve their own wounded pride. They still seem to think that they can appeal to some non-existant higher authority with words like "academic consensus" and "studies show". In other words they still think that's air they are breathing.
At the risk of eating another ban I think that it is quite possible for both of the following statements to be true...
The median east African has a room temperature IQ.
The median east African is more intelligent than most posters here on TheMotte.org including myself.
The thing that struck me about Africa when I was living there back in 2012-13 was that everyone had a hustle or three, the people who didn't have some sort of hustle going were bums, as in literally destitute. There's nothing like neccesity to narrow one's focus. Truth is I don't think guys like Bryan Caplan or Elizer Yudkowski can even hold a candle to the average Kenyan Cabby, in terms of observational astuteness, number of languages spoken, or real-time problem solving ability and there is no study you can cite that will convince me otherwise because the entire institution of social science is a fucking joke.
Truth is that primary goal of academia is not to educate, it is to sort winners from losers on the basis of academic aptitude and ability to flatter one's professor. The reason your professors graded on a curve was that your professors were lazy and stupid. After all "Why go through the trouble of designing your test so that only X% of students can answer 90% of the questions when you can just hand out the test as is and set the threshold for an A at the Xth percentile of correct responses?". At the end of the day it is much easier to get students to compete amongst themselves than it is to accurately grade their understanding/uptake of the material. This in turn comes back to what I've said before about how it is combativeness, not consensus, nor the desire to please that produces truth.
I heartily disagree that the latter is true, with my argument being simply, just look at that cursed continent.
That being said, I once read something by a prolific HBD poster on Twitter or Substack who I can't recall, who made an argument about why black people, despite significantly lower IQs than average, still seem to function much better than that low value would suggest:
When most people benchmark mental retardation, they implicitly consider the case of retarded white people, the majority of who have some kind of developmental or neurological disorder that's dragging them down. They're not just stupid, they're non-functional in important regards.
Whereas an 70 IQ African is not sick, they're just dumb, but are much more capable of social interaction and productive endeavors than the former, though they can't hope to match 100 IQ people of any race.
I believe that person showed anecdotes from special needs tard wranglers who noticed how the black kids were better behaved and apparently smart than the white ones, because they simply were much better functioning overall despite their identically low IQ scores.
I contend that a healthy chimp can beat a bad case of Downs in almost everything, even if they're both terrible at IQ tests. One is an animal well honed to its niche, whereas the other is simply outright defective.
So, African society and culture evolved to be well adapted to lower IQs, and they're not as clearly dysfunctional as you'd expect.
Leaving that aside, in desperately poor countries, like most of Africa, people need to be able to hustle or starve, they don't have well trodden paths ahead of them that they can follow as long as they're competent and come out ahead. While hustling is certainly a laudable thing, I suspect that if the world went to shit and we had to start from scratch, the median Mottizen would spank their asses.
Indians speak 2 or 3 languages because that brings clear and massive utility to them, presumably the same case for Africans who need some more. On the other hand, most Americans can speak English from the cradle to the grave and do just fine, so it's by no means their failure that they don't bother to do so most of the time. In their place, I wouldn't either.
You don't judge Bill Gates by the standards of Stone Age persistence hunters and get all perplexed that he has wealth and high status despite his abysmal inability to run a marathon.
I catch a lot of flak from HBDers on this sub when I argue that IQ doesn't measure intelligence per-se so much as it measures something like "Academic Aptitude" and that to the degree that any correlation between IQ and life outcomes exists it is mostly due to modern secular society using academics as a means of sorting "winners" from "losers" and enforcing social stratification.
Yet here you are seemingly making what is effectively the same argument.
Do you think tests like reaction time, or reverse digit span fall into this category? Reaction time is correlated with IQ:
0.53 is quite high as these things go.
Reverse Digit Span is 0.45 correlated with WISC-R IQs, according to Jensen.
I agree that tests like WORDSUM (whose correlation with IQ is 0.71) are very culturally loaded and surely are mediated by academics, but I can't see how reaction time, or the backward digit span are similarly affected.
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