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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30524 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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You do have to select from pools of people. Where do you think immigration authorities are getting their data from? People are pooled together into races and countries by birth. If authorities choose to accept data from both pools they have to sift through the 90 IQ pool and the 100 IQ pool. If they just flat out refuse every single person from the 90 IQ pool on the basis of very easily identifiable characteristics they don't have to do that and can as a result be more efficient in their search through a higher quality pool.

Education, skills and employment are not the same country by country. You care about the box 'race' because it serves as a proxy for a whole lot of information. Hell, even within countries the difference in ability despite education level, like in the US, you have big differences between races. The first few paragraphs of this article demonstrates this point

On top of that, 'race' to some extent, and ethnicity and country of origin to a greater extent, serve as great proxies for the credibility of claims made by hopeful migrant laborers. I know from experience there exists great stigma around foreign laborers in construction work, often times for good reason. I've heard similar things from my programmer friends deriding 'Indian code'.

I, from experience, would conclude that a lot of the claims made by foreign laborers are lies. Getting your foot in the door is much more important than being true to your own abilities. Especially since most imported labor is not working high skill jobs for high pay, but working low skill jobs for low pay. And they know this.

The incredibly detailed applications that the potential immigrants submit. Which are then reviewed in detail via the staff hired with the very high fees the applicants pay.

We are talking about two separate things then. Where I am from immigration officials are not paid by the applicants. They work on the tax payers dime.

It's not a search through a pool! You process all the applications.

I don't know what point or to what end you are making with this assertion anymore. I explained what I meant by 'pool'. If that contextualization is still going over your head I can't help you.

A lot of them are pretty easy to verify. If someone claims to have a job offer in the US, you can track down the employer and check. TOEFL is a serious test.

Which is completely separate to the matter at hand. If all we needed to vet immigrants was a company willing to hire them this discussion would not exist. The question pertained to where immigration was being pooled from.

My argument is that we don't need to use proxy measures like race when we have actual measures. Look at the actual schools that people attended, or the actual employers that they had.

Like I already said, even with information like education, race still gives a lot of information. Which can be better than education. There is no reason to not factor that in.

The comment to which you were originally replying said

And that comment was replying to the suggestion that countries focus more on Asian countries than African for immigrants.

My whole point is that you don't need proxies when you can evaluate people individually, and since individuals give detailed checkable applications, and pay for them such that you can hire as many examiners as you need, you don't need proxies, and therefore don't need to pool.

Like I said before, pooling is not something you do. It's something that is. There is no reason to not use all the information available, which includes country of origin, when selecting applicants so long as you don't have a shortage of applicants. Country of origin is not a proxy any more than education is. Outside of a US context there is an extremely clear benefit to limiting your selection to higher IQ countries before you go for lower IQ ones. I don't understand why someone would be against it.

If they just flat out refuse every single person from the 90 IQ pool on the basis of very easily identifiable characteristics they don't have to do that and can as a result be more efficient in their search through a higher quality pool.

It might be more efficient, but is the thing you're improving efficiency on really that much of a constraint in the first place?

Like it would take X amount of time for 100 immigration officials to thoroughly sift through 1000 applications. You're suggesting we save those 100 people a lot of time by implementing a race based admissions system, why not just double or triple the amount of immigration officials? It's not like they're a big item in any country's budget.

Where I am from the process is very expensive. But regardless of that, I would just kick the question back to you. Why have a more expensive less efficient immigration system? I don't get it.

Except it's not really a problem. The benefit I am pointing out still exists even with that accounted for so long as there is not a shortage of applications from higher IQ countries.

But besides that, your solution is much more restrictive than mine. I'm not sure why you are so eager to discriminate based on current wealth over race.

If I'm understanding you right you're arguing for race based admissions on the basis of efficiency. My counterargument is that efficiency isn't that an important factor if something is cheap in the first place, and so to answer your question this leads to the claim that it's unfair and unwise to exclude otherwise qualified people for the sake of saving some small amount of time and money when they would likely contribute much more to the country than that initial cost.

You're cutting costs when you streamline the immigration process, but you're also getting fewer quality migrants as a result (and there might be a separate argument for this being a good thing! But I don't think it'll hinge on the efficiency of the immigration process).

Your argument means less to me right away since I already said the process is expensive. But whatever.

I don't understand why the import country should care about 'fairness' or where you are getting the idea of 'fairness' from in this context. The process is at no stage fair to anyone. It's literally designed to be the opposite. The import country is picking and choosing to suit it's own need. Nor do I understand how it is unwise to have an exclusion criteria based on race/country of origin. So long as there is no shortage of applicants from higher IQ places there is no problem. And if that shortage ever comes about the economic landscape of the world would be so radically different from what it is now we would have to have a separate conversation, since this one is predicated on people actually wanting to come work in western countries.

You do have to select from pools of people. Where do you think immigration authorities are getting their data from? People are pooled together into races and countries by birth. If authorities choose to accept data from both pools they have to sift through the 90 IQ pool and the 100 IQ pool. If they just flat out refuse every single person from the 90 IQ pool on the basis of very easily identifiable characteristics they don't have to do that and can as a result be more efficient in their search through a higher quality pool.

I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Imagine you had a list of 1000 numbers and wanted to find the top 100. What you are proposing is randomly splitting the list into two halves with a very slight weighting so that larger numbers go into the first half, and then picking the top 100 from the first half. It is blatantly obvious that this is not going to give a very optimal outcome.

I don't insinuate that you suffering from some psychological ailment because you seemingly favor immigration from Africa.

(Edited) This topic more than any other seems to produce nonsensical logic like the above that I know people here (including you) would immediately catch talking about anything else. I don't know what else I'm supposed to conclude except agreeing with the progressive point that discussions about racial differences are always going to be ruined by the mother of all cognitive biases.

I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Imagine you had a list of 1000 numbers and wanted to find the top 100.

No dude, what you are doing became complete nonsense. It starts of with imagining a hypothetical that is antithetical to reality. We don't have a list of 1000 numbers, we have applications earmarked by a list of traits. Country of origin, country of residence, employment status, spousal status, education and so on. The point made by me was that accepting applications from countries with low IQ ends up wasting a whole lot more resources than applications from higher IQ countries. There is nothing nonsensical about this proposition. It is extremely simple.

Maybe this is a difference of governance, but where I am from the processing of any foreign born people, be it migrants or any other sort, is extremely costly. It takes time to go through the various bureaucracies to confirm the authenticity of the claims made. It's not picking 95 over 91.

What you are proposing is randomly splitting the list into two halves with a very slight weighting so that larger numbers go into the first half, and then picking the top 100 from the first half.

It's not random and the weighing is not "very slight".

It is blatantly obvious that this is not going to give a very optimal outcome.

From a purely mathematical perspective, picking from the higher number group is very obviously more optimal than picking from the lower number group as soon as you factor in that every pick has a cost and that sorting through the list of numbers is not as simple as your hypothetical makes it out to be.

This topic more than any other seems to produce nonsensical logic like the above that I know people here (including you) would immediately catch talking about anything else.

How mutual this feeling is.

I don't know what else I'm supposed to conclude except agreeing with the progressive point that discussions about racial differences are always going to be ruined by the mother of all cognitive biases.

This is not a discussion about racial differences. So far no one has gone off the deep end into denying IQ. So what we are left with is optimizing policy based on reality. Or making banal insinuations about biases whilst pretending we are immune to it ourselves.

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