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 -
I started writing a post for the culture war thread, and it got longer than I thought it would so I ended up just posting it as its own thread. I know some people don't always see those threads, so I thought I'd post a link here. I'm open to discussing it in either location:
https://www.themotte.org/post/604/the-case-for-ignoring-race
Adding to what I've said in the thread.
I think @Amadan has written on this a few times; I objected to his normative conclusions, but on facts it's true. You can't have a major European nation's worth of ethnically distinct people – and at that proud, self-assured, suspicious, confident in having been historically slighted, often outright ferocious people (whose self-perception of being Main Characters and moral core of the country is artificially inflated by the media) – with strong common identity, who disproportionately cannot compete in your economy, and expect them to buy the White/Asian "git gud" ethos. They may cope somehow, they may come to fear the punishment for insubordination and value rewards of cooperation, but they won't take it to heart. It's not as stable a form of race relations as the status quo. The whole system needs to be revamped into a drastically smarter thing to make it viable.
P.S. The issue with race comes from tail effects. I think you're underplaying just how bad the crime statistics are for prime age Black men. I'm wary of lily-white gopniks due to several violent encounters, but for most prime age White guys who look kinda sus it's fair to assume more or less good faith. With equivalent Black guys the odds are, like, 10X higher and that's probably an underestimate. I am positive that this one bit weighs too much to realistically discard.
This is, as far was I can tell, the crux of the matter. It’s fine as far as it goes to mathematically prove via HBD that black under representation in intellectual fields and poor achievement in general is largely the fault of them having worse genes, but it’s not an explanation that a population with an average IQ of 100 would accept, much less 85. You can repress sporadic violent outbursts, you can pay them to shut up and come down with maximum force on defectors, you can use affirmative action until they get taken care of, but ‘just letting them fail’ is not a way to deal with an unassimilable ethnic group with a population of 40 million dispersed throughout your country, which has a ready made excuse for failure that blames you.
Can you point me to a name, link that does the genetic proof for HBD. Most of the content I see here already assumes this axiomatically or is low resolution. What id like is something where I can start to 'cleave the arguments at their bones'
Eg, I'm curious what interpretation people have for the Flynn effect, or what the evidence base is for isolated genetic pools over long history..
Is what you are looking for, an analysis of a large number of genes that shows that certain genes are associated with high IQs and these genes are more common in certain populations? There are studies. I can't speak to their reliability. Alternately, are you looking for twin studies that show that identical twins are more common than non-identical twins in IQ?
The achievement gap/IQ gap between white and black people in the US is accepted by all sides. The argument is whether or not IQ is genetic, whether it is a meaningful measure, and whether the tests are fair. The arguments for each of these are many.
HBDers, whether they are right or wrong, have put in quite a lot of work.
The evidence that some populations were isolated (genetically and otherwise) is pretty strong. We can trace DNA and know that Australia and the New World were cut off for quite a while. Similarly, we can tell that Europe and North Africa were cut off from Sub-Saharan Africa almost entirely. There is almost no Neanderthal genes in Sub-Saharan Africa, etc.
Yep that's the level of analysis I'm thinking, and how each piece scaffolds to the broader claims around G intelligence over broad groups of lineages. I've read some Charles Murray and I'm underwhelmed by some of the aggregate data presented. I had thought by now a lot of interesting work on phylogenetic trees would be informing the conversation with some controlled natural experiments available.
But even then, 'some populations' being isolated limits representativeness and relevance for other populations.
Also there are different distributional considerations- perhaps some data is a group at the tail, ie Asian Americans. The analysis is very sensitive to what we consider our population and who were measuring etc.
People talk about Koreans being smarter but are they really genetically all that different from other Asians in the region?
I guess I want to learn from conversations on here so they have to actually have substance. I don't get that from the HBD enquiry here. Whereas a recent series of comments on the US and French revolutions gave me a lot.
The Neanderthal gene discovery is pretty fascinating. And aboriginals clearly have had time to become somewhat different. But is this a shorter term phenomenon akin to adaptation rather than a longer evolutionary time. I guess it does get into the overly complex here but I'm suspicious that any group over long enough time wouldn't select for intelligence in some form. When is G not useful in an environment. Similarly there's cultural/environmental factors that can lead to homogeneous populations but over long time the advantage is genetic mixing, so how long do homogeneous populations exist. Can we really assume that much about our current race categorisation around genetic similarity, or are we arguing that early divergence was the key differentiator.
Human brains are massive energy sinks which can best be used elsewhere in many many different environments. Consider the size of our muscles vs those of similarly sized chimpanzees and there is a huge difference. Basically as our brains evolved to grow larger our muscles atrophied because the energy required to support both large muscles and large brains was just not present in the environments available to our ancestors. There are plenty of situations where the marginal unit of strength is more useful than the marginal unit of intelligence (e.g. gazelles running from a hungry lion, being smart + slow gets you eaten, being stupid + fast makes you live another day as the lion instead eats the smart + slow members of your herd).
It's a miracle we ever evolved intelligence in the first place. Current theories are not that this happened so that we could better manipulate our physical environments by making tools etc. for personal gain, but rather so that we could get better at manipulating our social environment (i.e. relations with other members of our tribe) by currying favour with the powerful better than other individuals for personal gain instead and then underwent Fischerian Runaway to get to where we are now.
This assumes that IQ is correlated with energy expenditure of the brain, which is not obvious. Especially when we can easily observe that in times where energy is not of concern, high IQ is negatively correlated with fertility.
You extrapolate this correlation between IQ and brain calory expenditure from the fact that human brains are comparatively more energy intensive. But the difference in intelligence between an ape and a human is orders of magnitude larger than between the smartest and dumbest human currently alive. It is entirely plausible that our increased cost is mostly from qualitative difference that sets us apart from animals, not by the microoptimizations that distinguish humans from each other.
But even this relationship between intelligence and metabolic cost of the brain is not as straightforward as is popularly assumed, some animals which are much dumber than us devote a similar percentage of their total energy expenditure to their brains. Excerpt from the article:
For many other animals, it holds true though. That said, I can think of an alternative explanation why we devote so much energy to our brain: Maybe this isn't a tradeoff between intelligence and strength, instead the reason is that enough intelligence makes muscles partially redundant, allowing weak humans to outcompete strong humans at a certain IQ level. At this point it's not about feasibility of acquiring the necessary resources, just intra-species competition.
Of course this would raise the question why humans are the only animal on earth that became this intelligent, since the expensive brain-capabilities theory wouldn't explain it anymore. Maybe the path towards human-level cognition is not straight up the fitness curve and requires some unsusual environment to make it that way, like the Fischerian Runaway you mentioned. I have trouble to imagine other costs that higher intelligence would impose besides energy, maybe it takes longer for animals to mature, but this seems far fetched. Maybe intelligence isn't that useful, especially if you don't have the appendages to use tools. It didn't seem to help humanity very much until we discovered some key technologies a few hundred thousands years later until it really started to pay off.
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
More options
Context Copy link