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 -
So Georgia Meloni, the supposed far-right firebrand of Italy, is now planning to radically open up visa access for non-EU migrants. PiS in Poland are planning similar measures, even as they've let in record number of workers from moslem-majority countries since they've took power. Of course, the rhetoric from both the Italian and the Poles are all about asylum seekers and illegal migration. Sort of reminds me of GOP rhetoric about stopping people at the border even as they get jawboned by business lobbies to liberalise legal avenues for work visas.
It's the same thing here and it deserves to be pointed out that these fake populists in Europe are ultimately in thrall to the same power system as the old parties are. What's driving large-scale migration isn't some evil plot. It's not Soros or even the Kalergi plan. It's just capitalism. Both of those individuals may be colorful but ultimately the driving force is structural.
Of course, my explanation is boring, perhaps even banal, which is why it will never take off. Not enough drama. As for these developments, I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".
Incidentally, when reading about Max Weber's life in recent days, I found out that he was quite nationalistic as a young man and even campaigned against cheap foreign labour (principally from Eastern Europe). Quite ironic for someone who later became a liberal intellectual, but also amusing in that it shows that this thing has been going on for a lot longer than people realise and it likely won't end soon either.
Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate? I will keep repeating, it's at very best just a weak proxy for anything that actually matters. It's really not hard to construct a better proxy: just as literally the first thing that comes to my head, selecting people for a work permit based on the salary of the job they're getting would be a much better way than race/country of origin to pick out immigrants Italy might want (even if it's still not even close to perfect).
This is exactly why immigration concerns are so often dismissed as motivated mostly by literal racism. Such a crazy and bizarre logical jump happening this consistently is really, really suspicious.
Most accurate ≠ most useful.
If I can select from two pools of people, one Asian with an average IQ of 100, one Middle-east/African, with an average IQ of 90, why should I spend time looking for candidates in the group with a lower average IQ?
Hypothetically I might be able to devise a mechanism to accurately sift through both populations that finds 100% of the qualified people from both groups. But given I know one population is just a better pool of candidates there is little utility in going for the lower IQ group so long as the higher IQ group has enough qualified candidates, which it does have. All you are doing is wasting time and effort.
In a real world scenario the situation is abundantly clear. You don't want to waste any time on a worse pool of candidates since your error margins are going to be wider with a pool where the unqualified outnumber the qualified. This error margin is not just relating to work performance but baseline function in society. These errors cost lives and I find it very hard to weigh the alleged 'economic benefit' of mass immigration with descriptions from little girls of how they were gang raped over years, pictures of little children torn to pieces after someone intentionally drove over them in a truck, or descriptions of teenagers tortured to death in their own homelands, that were much safer prior to these 'economic benefits' arriving.
As for your own argumentation, sidelining peoples instincts as racism does little to foster understanding between two differing viewpoints. I don't insinuate that you suffering from some psychological ailment because you seemingly favor immigration from Africa. I assume you have good intentions and that your tend and befriend instincts are a valuable part of your humanity that has great utility and benefit to those around you. But it's not for a lack of issues that your instincts cause others that I refrain from such insinuations. I'd appreciate if you could do the same.
I think the relevant pro-HBD point here is reversion to the mean; you really should care about what the 'pool' of people you're drawing from looks like, because you'll soon have a new generation that looks as much like them as the parents you cherry-picked.
I guess you can get around this if you're willing to make sterilization a condition of immigration, or deport that portion of the 2nd+ generations who fail to meet your standards, either way committing to perpetually top up your country's population by cream-skimming the developing world. (holy dysgenics, Batman!) But I think either would be generally considered far worse than just prioritizing high-performing immigrant groups along racial lines.
Also not a problem if you reject group intelligence differences, of course, which is the official and default stance.
If you select a specific subgroup from a certain ethnic group as immigrants, their descendants will regress to the mean of that subgroup and not their entire ethnic group.
Sure, depending on how you define the subgroup, but if you can figure out a good category-marker that isolates a population with consistent differences in outcomes or measurable cognitive ability, go for it. You might end up cleaving along cultural lines rather than genetic, but if it reproduces in the new environment it's all good.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do you have any evidence to support the assertion that the children of successful immigrants tend to "revert to the (racial) mean"? That's not what I would naively expect to happen. My anecdotal experience is that people from successful families tend to be successful themselves.
More options
Context Copy link
Race is still only a rough proxy on what the "mean" is. There can and have been upper class elite sub groups within a race that consistently produce smarter kids than the rest of the racial group that they belong to.
You chose two horrible solutions, of course they sound terrible. And since you don't know what "mean" they are reverting to you could get a good estimate by testing two generations on an IQ test. Test either two parents and a kid, or two kids and a parent. Some set of scores are going to indicate that either the "mean" is very high for those particular people, or that you've got a three or four generations before it actually gets bad. And banning people for a problem they might create 60-90 years from now seems totally unnecessary.
Or if you don't want to do an IQ test. You can pick a set of reputable international and domestic universities, and require that two generations of family have degrees from those universities.
Or don't even set strict limits. Just say "prove to us that bringing your family here will make us better off, here is how some other people have done it".
I'll happily admit that my two suggestions are awful, but I know they would work and I'm not sure that's the case with your proposals.
Assuming we know we're creamskimming from a population with significantly worse outcomes on average than our own, this sample size isn't big enough to be relevant in figuring out if the family is from a good-outcomes subgroup (assuming such groups meaningfully exist) or if they're outliers who got lucky and had a kid that didn't regress to the mean too much. If it's the latter, you're going to be having problems in 5-15 years and not 60-90, as France is finding out right now.
That said, it does hint at an interesting solution where immigration authorites could do careful geneological work and data analysis on potential immigrants, to connect the relevant educational attainment and available testing results across large populations, to try to identify these high-performance subgroups. But again, though less horrible than my original suggestions, it still smacks far too much of eugenics ('racial credit scores'?) to be seriously considered. As opposed to quietly raising barriers to immigration from certain countries while easing them from others.
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