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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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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.