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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31380 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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HISD to eliminate librarians and convert libraries into disciplinary centers at NES schools

Not worth a post as top level thread on it's own; but hilariously dystopic enough to post here. It's only one (admittedly large and important) SD, but this is the type of shit Margret Atwood would write about as a totally out there thought experiment.

Hopefully enough people get mad it stops there.

To those people who are suggesting that library science isn't a real thing, I have a simple exercise for you: Suppose you are managing a very basic, but busy archive that adds dozens if not hundreds of new documents per day. Each document is assigned a sequential number, and has several names associated with it. When each document is entered, an index entry for that document must be created. Without a computer, how would you organize such an index to make it quick and easy for someone to find documents associated with a particular name?

You could use linked lists. The front desk of the archive would have a ledger that maps all names in the archive to the numerical ID of the first and most recent documents with that name, and all documents would be added to the shelves sequentially. When looking for all documents by John Doe, you would look up John Doe in the ledger and go to the first document. That document would have a cover page affixed to it that lists the ID of the second document associated with John Doe. The second document would tell you where the third one is, and so on until you get to the final one. Adding a new document would likewise be straightforward: put it in the first open space on the shelves, look up in the ledger where the last John Doe document is, affix a cover page to it that points to the new document, and then update the ledger. If a document has multiple names, simply repeat this process for each name.

I'd make a physical version of a relational database, actually pretty easy to accomplish with filing cabinets and folders.

I'm not a CS guy so I don't know what that is. If I walk into the office and tell the clerk I want to search the archive for records indexed to Michael Price, how do I find them?

If I walk into the office and tell the clerk I want to search the archive for records indexed to Michael Price, how do I find them?

literally just do that ^ ?

And what do they tell me? Do they just have the record locations memorized?

And what do they tell me?

how to find them or they find them for you?

Do they just have the record locations memorized?

probably not but they should know to find them since that is literally (a part of) their job?

This was already answered, and it was at one time taught in elementary school. You don't need a degree in library science to use an indexing system.

There's a bunch of cards/sheets/whatever containing lists of authors, each with a unique id (just a number that I increment with each new author added, though there are other ways). I find Michael Price and make a note of his id. Then there's another bunch of cards that has book/record/document titles ordered by author id. I find the sheet(s) for Michael Price's id and use that to find all books by him

There's other concerns like handling books with multiple authors, adding new sheets in the middle of others, etc. that would make it more complicated but it's nothing that can't be done by hand, especially for a smaller local/school library.

But we do have computers. It's 2023, not 1973.

The Cutter catalog system did it pretty much the same way a computer database would: Secondary indexes. You shelve the book based on one criterion, and you have multiple card catalogs with index cards sorted by the other criteria. You don't need a master's degree (or even any degree at all) to use this system, either. When you get a new book you make up all the appropriate cards and put them in the appropriate catalogs.

I would take a collection of loud noises and leave them on the front lawn overnight until they had been lightly coated in condensation. Then I would systematically organize the documents using these dewey decibels.

Suppose you are managing a very basic, but busy archive that adds dozens if not hundreds of new documents per day.

How many school libraries could this possibly describe? I think you and many others are conflating school libraries with public libraries. The latter are relatively large and provide all manner of community services and I could imagine a 2 year degree program could be necessary for managing such a thing. The former are small and often staffed by community volunteers or teaching assistants. I am not convinced that grad school or even a bachelor's is necessary for this function.

Without a computer

How many libraries of either variety do you think there are in US that don't any kind of computer or digital inventory management? Regardless, you could probably learn such an organization system in your bog standard 30 hour technical training class.

I'm not describing any library. I'm describing something much simpler than any library to illustrate a point that archival science is a lot more complicated than laymen think, largely in part because the professionals working behind the scenes have done such a good job that we don't notice them. And just because computers can handle a lot of our work now doesn't mean that the professionals in charge of these systems don't need to understand the underlying theory. Most people don't use 99% of the underlying theory they learned in school. I mean, why do we give a fuck if the kids can add when we live in a world with calculators?

Libraries are obsolete. Books aren't expensive enough to justify them anymore.

Naturally institutions try to justify themselves and find reasons for their own continued existence. The proper response is to dismiss such efforts.

Libraries are a lot more than just a warehouse for books. They provide a lot of services, including research help, internet and computer access, rooms that can be booked (hah!) for various purposes, and often a variety of other programs (tax help, kids programming, etc.). Also, just because some books are cheap doesn't mean that borrowing books as no purpose. Some people are still poor, or just have limited space, so "books are cheap" isn't that strong of an argument.

Books are free if you have internet and know where to look.

I doubt that the particularly rare or niche books that can't be readily found online would be stocked in a school library.

A computer and reliable internet access aren't free (nor a VPN), and many people rely on the library for the internet (ironically enough).

I don't think the internet replaces what libraries currently do, even around getting books. Being able to easily browse, to find books you never even thought of... a physical space like a library is way better than the internet.

My VPN that I use for piracy is entirely free, and I very much doubt that even the poorest of Americans don't have access to cellphones, since even Indian beggars usually have a phone of some kind. Despite what manufacturers would want you to believe, a phone is a computer too.

I'm not claiming that all libraries are useless, I'm just claiming that the ones in schools are no longer anywhere near as essential as they once were.

Books are free if you have internet and know where to look.

I would add the pretty major caveat that you have to be okay with stealing them. I mean don't get me wrong, I have pirated thousands of books in my life, but let's call a spade a spade.

Eh. Copying data you aren't authorized to copy and non-consensually appropriating physical objects that someone else was using don't seem similar enough to me to merit clustering them closely.

I don't feel like they're both spades. I think-

  • Taking a thing in such a way that it damages their livelihood because they were dependent on it to survive.
  • Copying something that someone might have otherwise have had some % expectation of being able to derive rent from you and similar minded people from that they need a certain threshold of to survive.

Have a substantial cleaving of the ethical reality in between them. In fact... I might even put stealing physical objects from sufficiently wealthy people who will tank it in a third category.

This isn't to make strong claims about the ethics just yet- there's also the consequences of disrupting societal norms around certain property rights via direct action to consider.

So all that said- yeah.

Re: "I would add the pretty major caveat that you have to be okay with [pointer at ethics around non-con copying] them."

I agree. Some issue taken with the word "steal" here and the claim that you're "calling a spade a spade" because it's equivocation in culture war debates elsewhere say- around copy-write or AI art- feel like disingenuous weaponizations.

That's true but it's not like the author gets paid when you borrow a book from the library either.

This isn't true globally. For example, in the UK the Public Lending Right Act 1979 grants authors a small payment each time their book is borrowed from a public library.

Checking Wikipedia for "Public Lending Right" indicates that similar schemes exist in other countries, e.g. Canada, Germany, Israel.

I would have an issue with stealing a book, pirating said book I see almost no issue at all. To me piracy is behavior on level of using adblocker or not paying voluntary fee for using toilet. I see it as a much lesser crime than theft.

Libraries organize books in a physical space. I can find most books free online if I know exactly which book I'm looking for. I can't, practically speaking, wander through the philosophy section in the Dewey decimal system and notice something.

There's also a significant difference between reading a physical book and a digital one.

It is impossible to browse Amazon the way you browse bookstores or libraries. Amazon is 95% less fun.

I mean more relevantly books may not be terribly expensive, but they’re durable goods that most people only use briefly, once. Libraries make sense in that context- borrowing really is the more efficient arrangement even for the non-poor.

This is one of the most foolish takes I've seen in the Motte. Libraries are not obsolete - in fact they are more important than ever in my view. The primary goal of a library was never to actually educate the masses, it was to give bright young kids from poor backgrounds and opportunity to learn.

The goal is to let intelligent autodidacts teach themselves and make something of themselves in a way they couldn't without a library. It's also one of the few true community spaces we have left in the Western world. For shame.

The goal is to let intelligent autodidacts teach themselves

Exactly. This policy is precisely the type of thing that people here complain about in every other context: A policy that focuses on troublemakers, to the detriment of a talented elite.

The talented elite don't go to these schools but if any of them do then locking up the trouble makers is the best thing we can do for them.

  1. They do if they are immigrants
  2. This is high school. Other than art and PE, the kids we are talking about are mostly in advanced classes in which the troublemakers are not enrolled.

People arguing against libraries in general may be doing that, but I don't see how this policy does.

It is replacing libraries, which OP notes harms the elite minority of intelligent didacts which uses libraries, with detention centers for troublemakers. Hence, it "focuses on troublemakers, to the detriment of a talented elite."

TheDag was responding to AshLael, who was saying that libraries as a whole are obsolete. They were not discussing the policy from the OP, which still keeps the books in schools, and lets the kids borrow them.

The fact that the books are still capable of being borrowed diminishes the harm, but does not completely eliminate it. People after all, regular browse books in libraries without checking them out. I can browse 10 books in an hour in a library. I am not going to take 10 books home on the bus inmy backpack. Not to mention that every book I take home is unavailable for every other kid. Not so a book that I browse and put back on the shelf. No matter how you slice it, the costs of this policy are almost entirely borne by those intellectually curious kids.

Not no matter how you slice it - it depends how well the libraries were run, and how big the problems with discipline are.

I'm also not sure I buy the idea that people would complain about "in every other context", chances are you're just misunderstanding their position.

I am not going to take 10 books home on the bus inmy backpack.

I've done this plenty of times :)

Books aren't expensive enough to justify them anymore.

This claim is going to need an in-depth number of citations showcasing that all books that libraries host are still available and purchasable, and their prices, and comparisons with past prices, all adjusted for inflation, as well as the average income of the parents who send their kids to a particular school, also adjusted for inflation.

The justification for tearing down institutions needs to have some measure of scrutiny.

I agree and have personally started hoarding physical books again because I don't trust electronic media to persist. It's happened before. A lot of info was lost when physical periodicals were converted to microfilm and destroyed.

That said, entrusting school librarians to preserve information is like asking the Christians to preserve the pagan scrolls in Alexandria. They have no problem destroying priceless artifacts of human genius (Huck Finn, Dr. Seuss) if it fits their ever-shifting ideological goals.

What do you mean by hoarding books? Do you by as many as you can or do you select certain ones you believe will become hard or impossible to find in the future? Also why don't you trust electronic media? Wouldn't it be better to just buy hard drives and then download everything you can come by via torrents, libgen e.t.c. and figure out some sort of backup plan?

I just mean that I'm buying physical books instead of electronic now. I'm not planning on being an Irish monk keeping the flame through the Dark Ages.

I suppose that a well-maintained RAID system would work too. But physical media seems idiot proof.

What I don't trust in electronic media is this:

  • Corporations controlling art. For example, publishers changing the words to old Roald Dahl books and pushing this to people's devices.

  • Flawed digital conversion and storage processes. We know that books can last for hundreds of years with little human effort. In the 20th century, there was a large-scale effort to convert books and periodicals to microfilm with the original media destroyed. This destroyed a lot of knowledge. Even if microfilm readers weren't inferior to books (they are), the process destroyed information because it was done in a low-resolution way. Sometimes the conversion didn't work at all and the text was lost entirely. In other cases, information is made inaccessible because old devices no longer work. Is there going to be a machine capable of reading my 2020s era hard drive in 100 years? Original media should be preserved.

  • Corporations controlling personal information. We've all heard tales of corporations like Google destroying people's information or locking them out of their accounts. Why would we hold media with companies like this when we can just have physical?

Is there going to be a machine capable of reading my 2020s era hard drive in 100 years?

So far in the history of electronics/computing, I feel like there have been few actual dead ends on the question of transferrability, particularly when the stored data is already digital (and my sense is that probably a majority of analog data resulted in at least one device capable of conversion to digital, even if it wasn't widely used). So, I think I'd be less worried about whether we can get your digital file off of your 2020s hard drive and onto whatever storage medium people will be using in 2120.

File interpretability seems like potentially a more difficult challenge. Look at all the old, like, DOS software that is becoming harder and harder to use. Sure, DOS emulation exists now, built to run in Windows, but if we jump to a new class of OS, who is going to write the new DOS emulator? Or are we going to end up with chains of "new OS emulates Windows, where we have a DOS emulator"? This would seem incredibly brittle and unlikely to be well-maintained enough to not inevitably have some significant number of original files become unsupportable.

That said, when it comes to digital books in particular rather than executables and other files generally, I wonder if I can reel us back a bit. If I fire up Calibre and look to convert a book, I see 18 options. Not all of them are really relevant, but there are a bunch. So I think the numbers game works in a different direction than that of the DOS example. The trend for executables seems to be toward not many different OSs, so if at any point, one backwards chain doesn't get emulated, you lose everything prior that was dependent on that chain. For pure data storage formats, if I can freely and easily replicate the same data in 10 different formats, all I need is one to make it into the new OS, and I've still succeeded. Hopefully, the same numbers game will happen in the new OS, and that one surviving format will become convertible into whatever ten new formats come along with the new OS. That the other nine died is immaterial in this case.

So, perhaps the strategy is that we just need to have people like you continuing to fill their hard drives, but make sure you don't collapse everything down to a single format. Have a script in Calibre or something that automatically converts every book into every format and store all of them simultaneously. Storage is cheap, especially with file sizes for books being so small.

I suppose that a well-maintained RAID system would work too. But physical media seems idiot proof.

Why mention RAID? I’m honestly curious because this comes up a lot with data hoarding. RAID helps with maintaining uptime and availability for an applications during a disk failure, but it does not provide backups. With RAID your capacity investment is diminished by mirroring or parity storage cost, which could be better allocated to additional backup media. Do you agree?

I disagree. The reason RAID is not a backup is because it does not protect against accidentally deleting data, and compared to an external backup the chance of something breaking both drives is greater because they're next to each other. However, it is not better than external backups in terms of capacity; the data is just as big regardless of where you store the drives or how you access them. It's less space-efficient than having a single external copy, but that's not a backup, that's your primary copy being stored elsewhere.

And practically speaking, RAID is more reliable than external backups because it's being constantly checked through normal disk usage. If your external backup has had an error, you won't find out until you access it, which is really bad if the reason you're accessing it is because your primary copy doesn't work. In a company you can make it someone's job to verify the backups by periodically restoring them to a test system, but most individuals won't be doing that.

However, it is not better than external backups in terms of capacity; the data is just as big regardless of where you store the drives or how you access them. It's less space-efficient than having a single external copy, but that's not a backup, that's your primary copy being stored elsewhere.

I mean if I have 10 disks and split 5 into a data pool with no mirroring/parity and 5 into a backup set, then I have half the total capacity of all disks. However if I turn 5 into a raid, I’ll have some number of disks capacity -N depending on raid level. I could then turn the backup set into the same raid level (online backup) to match, but in this case raid gives me less than half the total capacity of all disks due to extra parity storage.

And practically speaking, RAID is more reliable than external backups because it's being constantly checked through normal disk usage. If your external backup has had an error, you won't find out until you access it, which is really bad if the reason you're accessing it is because your primary copy doesn't work.

True, however my approach would be to have both online and offline backups. Online ZFS backup should help here. To keep costs down, this is just 3 disks for every dataset zpool I’d set up. Then, an additional 3 disks when that runs out. Add another disk or tape in to this for offsite backup if you want.

Also offline guards against ransomware.

What do you think, what is your approach?

More comments

Do you agree?

Quite possibly. I haven't really given it much thought TBH. I just think digital archival methods don't have a great (or long) track record. Certainly, any one person's efforts wouldn't be likely to survive their death.

Not everyone can afford books. Poverty is widespread. And telling everyone to pirate all the books online is not something a government can do.

I still enjoy them. When getting into a topic I'm completely ignorant of, I'll just walk down the relevant stacks, grab books that catch my eye and skim a few sections or pages. I often find tangentially related books that I never would have otherwise if I had just searched 'Chinese history,' say, on Amazon. This was particularly valuable when I was a child and ended up with a cornucopia of books on the wild west, the Yukon and California gold rushes, the world wars, etc., none of which I even knew existed at such a young age. I feel much more nostalgic about public libraries than school libraries so this article doesn't evoke much of a reaction, but the thought of losing the former feels like a gut punch.

I also still use them to study or work if I'm not at the lab/between jobs. IMO, nothing beats a quiet, secluded desk buried in the middle of the stacks for focus.

Books aren't prohibitively expensive sure, but space for a home office can be.

I find it much easier to study in a library given the lack of family/housemates making noise and interrupting me, and how few options you have to distract yourself (I could boot up steam in a library but it seems weird enough that I don't get the temptation).

What kind of specs do library computers even have? I doubt you'd get anything more graphically intensive than Minecraft and Terraria running on one.

Oh I bring my own laptop. It's really about having a separate space for focused work.

Depending on the quality of the library just wandering through the bookshelves can be fruitful too, found some good books during university that way.

Can somebody please steelman the case for libraries at all? Certainly there was a time when writing things down on dead trees was important, and publishing a book was an important way of contributing to the collective knowledge, but that just isn't the case anymore.

The libraries should be removed from every school, certainly the people with "library science" degrees should be removed, and the space should be used for something more in line with the original intent. Every school should get a few H100s, make a more advanced computing lab, put a CNC mill in there, etc. Libraries should basically be very well funded makerspaces at this point, not shelves of useless books.

I guess I get a library as a sortof throwback to something that was needed a long time ago, but at this point books are like vinyl records. Cool, and I love them, and dream of having a massive library in my home some day, and I am a compulsive book buyer, but...not really necessary for a school. In addition to that, it seems like L I B R A R Y has become some sort of cultural importance for the left, where scary book burning or book bans has become somehow meaningful to them.

Get rid of the libraries. Replace them with materials science labs or something cool.

even if they had no practical purpose whatsoever, a civilized society ought to have libraries. any decent people would understand this point intuitively.

Libraries are a more romantic and sensual place to interact with words than a computer screen is. I have had dreams about being in libraries full of arcane knowledge, I cannot remember ever having had a dream about surfing Wikipedia. You yourself say that you dream of having one.

I think that what we should really get rid of is mandatory education. It is a day care program dishonestly masquerading as an educational system and it packs kids into close contact with each other right at the age at which most of them behave more like chimpanzees than at any point before or after in their lives. To force this on people is fundamentally abusive. School also trains kids that what they should expect from life is to be closely observed and trained by bureaucrats. And in the age of the Internet, school is also near-irrelevant as a source of learning when it comes to anything above very basic math and reading skills.

Tear down the mandatory education system.

@VoxelVexillologist said below that classroom discipline is red-coded. I disagree. Some boring bureaucrat loser disciplining a bunch of kids into sitting still and listening to him drone on and on is at least as blue-coded as it is red-coded. Sure, maybe classroom discipline supported by a threat of violence is somewhat red-coded (and abusive), whereas classroom discipline maintained by nagging and shaming is more blue-coded (and also abusive, just not as much), but the actual goal of the education system is not red-coded. Really the education system is neither blue-coded nor red-coded. It is corporate-coded. It keeps kids out of their parents' way so that they can work and it prepares kids for a dull life working the cogs of the machine.

A kid's proper response to the education system is to tell the teacher to eat a dick. When I read about school shootings, my usual reaction is to wish that the kid had just focused on shooting teachers and staff instead of gunning down fellow kids.

I think that what we should really get rid of is mandatory education. It is a day care program dishonestly masquerading as an educational system and it packs kids into close contact with each other right at the age at which most of them behave more like chimpanzees than at any point before or after in their lives. To force this on people is fundamentally abusive. School also trains kids that what they should expect from life is to be closely observed and trained by bureaucrats. And in the age of the Internet, school is also near-irrelevant as a source of learning when it comes to anything above very basic math and reading skills.

Tear down the mandatory education system.

Beautifully said! The mandatory education system is, along with factory farming, one of the most horrible moral abuses of our day. It's incredible how ordinary people just paper over the horror that kids must deal with, and think throwing more money at the problem will solve it.

Tear. It. Down!

A kid's proper response to the education system is to tell the teacher to eat a dick.

Do you really think the little darlings who use that language in schools (and they already do) are the kind who are going to educate themselves via the Internet? Maybe if it's about how to get drugs, guns and hos, but nothing that will be useful for paid employment or being a productive member of society.

I don't know where you work, maybe you can get a day's work done with people screaming at you to eat a dick every time you ask them have they that file, did they finish loading that pallet, etc.

I've had dreams about trying to look up information on a smartphone. It's frustrating because I can't look up anything in a dream that I don't already know.

Steelman: Others have brought up the tactile pleasures of physical books. A library isn't just a storehouse for books; it's a hub for curated information. Yes, so much information is available online, but 90% of my searches are garbage and a good chunk of the rest is unsourced or does not attribute its sources, and often badly needed a proofreader. Not to mention all the wingnut conspiracy nonsense that a discerning searcher has to be able to distinguish from a valuable and competent piece of writing. Most of the high quality stuff is locked down under paywalls. You can argue over whether it should be the case, but for now the current state of affairs throws up a lot of obstacles to a seeker of knowledge. "Free and open" internet is the wilderness without a map or guide.

So libraries curate. They manage books that have been through an editing and review process - not that there's not low quality junk but your ratio of low to high quality tends to be better. Because the books are physical, they can't be tampered with after they've been printed like epublishers do - it's a fixed text. Regarding online writing, libraries get subscriptions to get you behind those paywalls and help provide access to high quality online sources. If you're lucky, your library will have a friendly specialist to help you do your research, point you to the right sources, and even give classes on internet literacy and basic computer skills. Many libraries host author talks, social events, STEM programming, ESL classes and support, and I've even seen workshops on things like doing your taxes and preparing a will, financial literacy kind of stuff. And this is all free.

Generally, librarians have an important job as curators of a repository of humanity's knowledge. Now because it's curated, that can have drawbacks because you have to ask who is doing the curating and with what ideological bias. That's a fair question to consider but I do have two rebuttals. Number one, there are practical considerations. Libraries have to make decisions all the time about which books to buy and which books to keep simply because there is a finite space in which to keep them. Sometimes these decisions may be ideologically driven but more often I think it's just a matter of logistics. I believe they also have certain understandings with publishers which influence what new books are even offered or made available to them. Number two, thank god for the internet because when there is a book the local library doesn't carry, for whatever reason, Amazon is only a click away. There are very few books that are truly banned as in, impossible to get anywhere. If they're out of print it might take some searching, but my point is that libraries aren't the only source for books, as you point out, so the amount of handwringing over them not carrying this or that book does seem a bit overblown.

None of this is specific to school libraries, by the way. I just think this is getting a bit long but obviously there are further considerations when presenting material to minors and who decides what's appropriate. That's a very thorny issue IMO but it doesn't seem to be a factor in this case.

I can't imagine how jealous I'd be as a postgrad at some university if high schools were getting more H100s than me... Just stick them in the cloud for the best high-schoolers in the country to use if they can!

Books are useful for children, for developing reading skills if nothing else. Where else are they going to develop vocabularies? Tiktok? Libraries should be modernized, maybe some Kindle e-readers would be more economical. Webnovels, manga, whatever... temples to the written word are still relevant today.

Books are useful for children, for developing reading skills if nothing else.

Okay this is fair. Maybe a library for children's books? (I'm thinking like...5 years old and younger?)

I can't imagine how jealous I'd be as a postgrad at some university if high schools were getting more H100s than me

This is kindof the world I want. Some cool resources are available to high schools to the point that it makes other's jealous. Noboyd on earth is jealous of a high school library. Change that and make the "library" something cool/something to be proud of!

Why just five years and younger? Reading skills develop long after that. I can't imagine anyone here would endorse any other policy which is even remotely adjacent to "schools should not teach anything beyond what can be mastered by a 5-yr-old." (Note that I am not saying you are advocating that. Only that what you are advocating is adjacent thereto).

I don't know about anyone else but while I learned to read in early grade school, I developed my reading skill and vocabulary between maybe 12-18 reading adult fiction, plenty of it borrowed from libraries.

I don't see the purpose of people with degrees in "librarian science" though.

Steelman: every librarian should be a wise old man who can tell you stories and has lists and lists of books for every possible personality type and interest. He should be on call throughout the day for anyone who wants to chat about a book or author. This would motivate children to read, and influence them toward good books!

Steelman: books are in fact cool, and zoomers would benefit from touching something that doesn't have a screen in it.

The less money that gets wasted on warehousing sullen kids and boosting the employment of sullen evangelists who haven't graduated to adults in their demagoguery yet is by definition a good thing, which is why it won't happen.

I mean they did fire hundreds of administrators.

Hopefully enough people get mad it stops there.

Why would anyone get mad at that?

'Cause libraries are where people with high IQ teach themselves in between being with the herd in class.

They don't matter to room temperature IQ types, but they are extremally important to poor kids that win the intelligence lottery.

I was teaching myself at home.

I understand how having a library is better than not having a library, other things being equal, and how people could get mad at a library being taken away, but if the school has other issues (and it seems it does), and this is a way of solving them (and it seems it is), it's not obvious to me at all that this is something to get mad over.

How poor were you?

Eg, I didn't have any internet access in the house I lived in until most of the way through highschool, where was I supposed to teach myself?

My parents were getting by, but I'm from a poor country, so probably poorer than you. Also old enough that non-dial-up Internet was only just starting to take off around the time I was 16.

You borrow a book, you read it at home, what's the problem?

You need the library, then.

Borrowing a book isn't a substitute for all the services that having a library with librarians in situe provides, is my point.

The school still let's you borrow books, and I doubt disagree the second paragraph.

Not worth a post as top level thread on it's own

The expectations of effort and not waging the culture war are the same in this thread as they are in the general subreddit. This post doesn't meet those standards. This is a warning.

Idk do you really need librarians as such in 2023? What exactly do they do that some lower level admin without a corresponding graduate degree would be able to do?

Is there much evidence that the presence or lack of presence of a librarian or library has much of an effect on student outcomes?

In some states there is a craze for advanced degrees in education. You can't teach in public school without a master's degree or an actionable short term plan to get one ASAP in Connecticut, Maryland, and New York. Other states more reasonably encourage master's degrees with a higher pay scale.

Having a graduate degree is, like it or not, just how schools hire these days. No doubt they would prefer their lunch ladies to have masters degrees in nutrition, but the job market for dietitians just isn’t bad enough for that.

Yes, the actual job of a school librarian(which is some fairly low-level management) should only require an associates degree(and even that is on the high end of necessary qualifications), but it’s a school system.

The head of the American Library Association is someone named Emily Drabinski, who described herself as a "Marxist lesbian". While I like my local library just fine, I must say that it is not enough to be merely not Marxist, I feel that it is a moral duty to be anti-Marxist. I would prefer that libraries just not be Marxism-aligned, but if I can't get them pushed in that direction, I'm fine with just replacing them in the places that need some discipline quite a bit more than they need books on LGBTQIA2S+ theory.

Wow, the state appointed superintendent is doing a lot more than expected.

In most schools the library is essentially just a quiet study space to do homework at lunch time or whatever. The job of “library professional” is bullshit. Very old rare books at archival libraries are handled by specialist curators anyway.

Library science is a fake degree taken pretty much exclusively by staunch ideological enemies of the right, dismantling librarian provision is both justified and useful.

The reason it's happening is quite simple: libraries are a useful weapon in the culture war that only one side has access to (school librarians being 88% Democrat), so the other side is saying, to quote Mr. Meeseeks over on DSL (and he's used it in this exact context), "that position has been completely overrun; commence shelling."

One can argue about whether this is good or bad, but I'll only say that it's sad.

The idea that you need an advanced degree in "library science" to help school children pick out books is absurd. They'll still have the books, it just sounds like they're getting rid of the librarians and using the space for other things as well. I don't think every school needs a full library with dedicated staff.

And anything that "increases inequity" can't be all bad.

Books will remain on shelves and students will still be able to borrow books on a honor code system

The important thing you need a librarian for is choosing the books to go in the library, not working with the kids. Unfortunately, library science programs are just leftist indoctrination nowadays, so having a librarian is actively harmful if you don't want to further leftist indoctrination.

The important thing you need a librarian for is choosing the books to go in the library, not working with the kids.

I have to disagree there, because the results of our school being part of a specific project to get a library with a dedicated librarian, for disadvantaged schools, really did make a huge difference. Yes, choosing the books is important, but it was about working with the kids as well: finding magazines and books that boys (in particular) would read, the kind of boys who hate reading, struggle with school textbooks, have little to no support for education at home, and are in danger of falling behind in literacy. The kids who would leave school not knowing how to read beyond a very basic level, if at all.

Working with teachers and parents. Planning and holding events (e.g. getting a writer of YA fiction to come give a talk, the Darren Shan books if anyone knows them). Making the library a place the kids wanted to use. A ton of other things beside which honestly did make a huge difference.

If it's the kind of "let's pack the shelves with books about how it's okay to be a sex worker to pay for your trans hormones" librarian activism, I totally agree. But if you get a properly trained school librarian who knows about working with kids in disadvantaged schools, it really is a benefit and a resource for the school.

properly trained school librarian who knows about working with kids in disadvantaged schools

Are there very many of those, and do school districts have a way to hire them?

School district hiring policies are set by the sorts of people who go into education policy admin, who are incapable on a fundamental level of understanding the concept of non-classroom qualifications, let alone how they work on a basic level. And it would shock me if ‘ability to work with disadvantaged boys’ could be taught in schools- certainly a library science degree is not going to teach it, and educational pedagogy studies or whatever is fan fiction of reality on a good day. The population that is able to motivate disadvantaged boys has better things to do with its time than work in school libraries, mostly does not have degrees, and there’s probably no way to consistently identify these people anyways.

You lucked out and got one. Good. But why should we expect we can replicate it? Short of sending army sergeants or juvenile prison wardens to take over school libraries, I don’t think we can.

Do you really need a degree in 'library science' to achieve this?

It seems like the activities you're describing have little to do with the library themselves and could be performed by anyone with pedagogical experience (or any other 'social' type work with kids) and not necessarily a 'proper' librarian with a degree in 'library science' (this is your tiny school library, not the Library of Congress). Of course, modern pedagogy has also been overrun with woke ideology but that's a discussion for another time.

Does this have to be done at each library? Can't there be a standardized compiled list of books for a school. It hardly seems reasonable that each school needs a book procurer.

Would you mind at least translating the headline? So far I got

  • HISD = Houston Independent School District. I think that's saying it's the public school district covering Houston (and some of its suburbs?) and the "Independent" part is just part of how school districts are named/organized in Texas?
  • NES = New Education System... whatever that is?
  • SD = School District

New Education System is the Houston Superintendent's plan to fix the failing schools in Houston.

You’re correct, HISD is Houston schools, and prior to the state taking it over was just a bigger version of every other school district in Texas(independent is just how they’re organized), the new superintendent is an Abbott appointee with dictatorial powers within his sphere. The new education system is just the changes he’s making to HISD.

Looking up the high schools that are part of the New Education System, and the system is contained to those high schools and their feeders, they're likely to be the worst performing schools in HISD also I'd bet library utilization measures are lowest in the district. This probably ends up being a beneficial move if it allows triage removal of the most disruptive students from classrooms where their ability to slow the entire class' learning rate is dramatic.

Does that really necessitate getting rid of the library, though? It's not like there's anything special about the room that makes it the only place to put these kids; I would assume you could use any room. It also means that the kids who are using the library are deprived of a beneficial resource that isn't likely to be easily replaced since there access to books probably isn't great otherwise.

They’re keeping the books, just firing the librarians. It seems notable that the previous administration removed by the state for either incompetence or being particularly loud democrats, depending on who you believe, had a goal of putting a library in every school.

This is one of those "on the one hand, on the other hand" posts for me. This is years back now, but the school I attended got a 'school library' after I left (they did new building on) but they didn't have a dedicated librarian. Which meant it ended up being used as a study room/extra classroom, not a library, even though the books were still in place. A teacher was supposed to be in charge of the library but in practice nobody bothered or wanted to do it.

Then I worked in a school where they got a project for having a libary and librarian and boy did it make a difference, to the point that our principal begged for them to extend it after the project time was up. This was a school that wasn't, let's say, for the very academically inclined and it was officially a Disadvantaged Area school. Having a proper librarian made a huge difference, it was a way of getting boys to read, it was a way of helping literacy, there were all kinds of events and projects and involving parents as well, and it became the carrot to the educational stick - it made kids want to go into the library, and so they had to improve with behaviour, attendance, etc.

So having a proper library and more importantly someone who is trained for working in schools really makes a difference.

Now, what I imagine is going on here is (1) they need space for what in the school I mentioned above was called a "Behaviour Support Classroom" but sounds basically like what is described for the 'discipline centre'; you put the kids who are having a meltdown into a room on their own or with only a couple others, which is supervised by a teacher. They do schoolwork or even if they just sit there until it's time to go home, at least they are contained, safe (very important because schools get sued into oblivion if Little Johnny tells the teacher to fuck off, storms out, and wanders around town on his own while he's supposed to be in school) and calm down, and sometimes it even works to get them one-on-one time to help them do some actual work (2) if it's like my school, space is at a premium - even when the new building was completed, it was already obsolete and needed extra room (3) they don't have, or can't get, or can't afford to pay, a proper school librarian.

So to solve all their problems they're turning the library into the support classroom and a teacher will be nominally in charge of running the library, which won't happen, but it will be used as a holding place for the meltdown kids. I don't like this, because as I said, a proper library really does make a huge difference in this kind of school, but I'm not going to reflexively assume "it's the Republicans cutting public schooling to the bone and refusing resources" because for failing schools/schools in deprived areas, there just isn't the money or the teachers who would make a difference available.

I think schools should have libraries, but I admit I'm not sold on the importance of advanced degrees in library science.

I think my contrarianism is going into overdrive.

2003: I hear this news story. "Oh no! Think of the kids!"

2013: "This is almost certainly sensational click bait."

2023: "This is a good thing"

Honestly, most schools need more discipline not less. And they don't need adults with certificates censoring and controlling the information they have access to either. Not that it matters. No one's using the library anyway.

So yeah, more discipline, fewer school librarians. I'm down for that. I'd like to thank ABC13.com for this totally worthwhile piece of journalism.

You know, if school libraries were where an 11yo would go in and pick up Plato or Nietzsche, because they were interested and it was random I would be very happy. I don't think that's how it is these days.

My town's local library had a Celebrate Banned Books! month sign up and I immediately thought "yeah right" and tried looking up some right wing thought crime books in the catalog and found they didn't stock any.

I don't actually want to read any myself, but how cynical do you have to be to put signs like that up when you know full well you specifically filter out books on ideological basis.

Sounds about right.

The American Library Association's "Banned Books List" is based on books that patrons have requested being removed from libraries. It therefore only includes books that are stocked by libraries, and are therefore NOT banned.

Books which are actually banned can never appear on the list by definition.

So the school district in question was recently taken over by the state due to the consistently failing scores of some of its schools. This is somewhat politically controversial because it's a red state but a blue district, although most at least seem to agree that the schools themselves are underperforming. The new superintendent brought in to fix this is trying some pretty aggressive reforms -- honestly I would have expected business-as-usual with maybe a hint of red politics, followed by little actually changing.

My understanding of the details from peripherally following this are as follows:

  • New Education System schools are (mostly?) the failing ones: they seem to be leaving the well-ranked ones alone.
  • Several thousand (IIRC) non-teaching administrators at the district office have been laid off.
  • Teacher salaries at NES schools have been bumped measurably, but will also be tied to test scores.
  • There seems to be a focus on the core "Three Rs" (reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic), and honestly swapping librarians for improved classroom sizes and reducing classroom disruption might be worth it. It sounds like they are keeping the actual books.

Overall, I'm surprised they are willing to try an experiment with such large changes. Some of the changes seem a bit partisan, but "reduce classroom sizes and pay teachers more" seems to generally have bipartisan expectations of improving scores. Classroom discipline is red-coded, as is cutting non-core services. I'm modestly hopeful it will show results, but the blue teacher constituency would love to see egg on the State' face. I'm never quite sure how much we can expect the education system to solve issues at home: maybe in aggregate, but not in every case, certainly.

It's a sensible cost-cutting move on the whole. School districts tend to accumulate a mass number of redundant organizational administrative staff if allowed to over the years.

The main problem is that in schools like this, the libraries tend to be a refuge for the well-performing, high-iq students, so placing the high-iq students in the same room as the students who regularly and routinely misbehave is a problem.

If a student is regularly disruptive, one must wonder if they will be able to function in society.

It should be noted that Texas plans to pass a school choice bill in October, and most of the high-IQ students who’d been hiding in the library will probably transfer to catholic schools next year anyways.

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

The Case for Ignoring Race

There are two arguments I want to push forward. The first is about ignoring race in your personal life. Ignoring your own race, and ignoring the race of others around you. And the second argument is to ignore race in the policy space. Ignoring race in college admissions, immigration, crime, etc. I also don't want to make the case that only white people should ignore race. I think it is generally beneficial for everyone to ignore race, but I'm guessing that most of the racial identitarians (people who place great importance on racial identity) that are here on themotte are white racial identitarians.

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Summary

Race is clearly a thing that exists. Genetic differences exist across races. The simplest proof is in people's skin pigmentation. However, genetics doesn't have to dictate anyone's destiny. Genetics can be barriers to unlimited possibilities, but your final place within a large set of possibilities is up to you.

And because race and genetics do not fully dictate who a person is, those characteristics do not provide good information about an individual that isn't obtainable in a myriad of other more reliable ways.

No.. SOMETHING IS MISSING FROM THIS ENTIRE CONVERSATION.

@self_made_human

Certainly you should avoid being in that situation in the first place

Yes agreed. But you mean being in a situation where you have to pass a black man late at night on a spooky street, and I mean living in a universe where black people are scary. (I mean, you in particular probably agree with me on that too but- this popped to me when you said that.)

@hanikrummihundursvin

It was his DNA

Ok. Then how do we get better DNA?

I'm going somewhere with this I swear. This isn't just transhumanism- this is-

The reason affirmative action is bad is because it is trying to fit an unfit population.

Yes! This is so close to what I want to say! You can't just shove the unfit in random places and expect magic to happen... But as long as you still pressure them to do well in the places you shove them (->this might be a good place to attack<-), you can expect magic to happen. Giraffes didn't get long necks by magic or genetic drift. They got them by breeding with Giraffes with long necks!

My point- what this whole conversation is missing- SEXUAL SELECTION IS METALEMARKIAN On a species-wide level, giraffes DID get longer necks by trying to have longer necks!!! So there is good reason to give races opportunity to aspire towards one another's greatness.

Also, memetic selection is Lemarkian even faster. But that's somewhat evened out by the fact that you and competitors both have a whole planet of well developed memes already at your fingertips when you decide to do something- And is already present in this thread implicitly (cultural differences are memetic.) And- its already factored in. A lot of G seems to be the ability to select the correct memetics from those available.

I'm not wholly sure what you're trying to say.

Giraffes got longer necks because the ones with necks too short to reach the treetops died of starvation. In short, sexual selection is meta-Lamarckian (i.e. not Lamarckian) to the extent that successful variants reproduce and unsuccessful variants don't. Creating these conditions artificially was the core of classical eugenics, but I don't think it's what you're advocating?

Yeah maybe I should have chosen a species with less contested evolutionary causation.

from Wikipedia:

There are several hypotheses regarding the evolutionary origin and maintenance of elongation in giraffe necks.[57] Charles Darwin originally suggested the "competing browsers hypothesis", which has been challenged only recently. It suggests that competitive pressure from smaller browsers, like kudu, steenbok and impala, encouraged the elongation of the neck, as it enabled giraffes to reach food that competitors could not. This advantage is real, as giraffes can and do feed up to 4.5 m (15 ft) high, while even quite large competitors, such as kudu, can feed up to only about 2 m (6 ft 7 in) high.[63] There is also research suggesting that browsing competition is intense at lower levels, and giraffes feed more efficiently (gaining more leaf biomass with each mouthful) high in the canopy.[64][65] However, scientists disagree about just how much time giraffes spend feeding at levels beyond the reach of other browsers,[12][57][63][66] and a 2010 study found that adult giraffes with longer necks actually suffered higher mortality rates under drought conditions than their shorter-necked counterparts. This study suggests that maintaining a longer neck requires more nutrients, which puts longer-necked giraffes at risk during a food shortage.[67]

Another theory, the sexual selection hypothesis, proposes the long necks evolved as a secondary sexual characteristic, giving males an advantage in "necking" contests (see below) to establish dominance and obtain access to sexually receptive females.[12] In support of this theory, necks are longer and heavier for males than females of the same age,[12][57] and males do not employ other forms of combat.[12] However, one objection is it fails to explain why female giraffes also have long necks.[68] It has also been proposed that the neck serves to give the animal greater vigilance.[69][70]

The point really isn't about Giraffes. The point is that you can argue for affirmative action as a sort of eugenics through social integration into a specific environment.

Appreciate it, and it's interesting to hear about the sexual selection theory.

I think my point about sexual selection still stands, though. The core of sexual selection, and of classical eugenics, is that the fit breed and the unfit die. As a method of group improvement this probably works but is ethically dubious.

I can think of two things you might be arguing for, and I'm not sure which of them you're going for:

  1. If you introduce a fitness 0.5 individual into a fitness 1.0 environment, that individual's children are more likely to have high fitness. Unfortunately that's balanced out by their partner having less fit children, so from a population perspective it's a wash.

  2. If you introduce people into a more stringent environment and force them to live up to new standards, they'll improve. This is what I think you mean, but there are many issues. It doesn't change the underlying genetics, and also if the affirmative action'd people can't live up to your standards then you will either have to lower your standards (fail) or try harder to force them to do something they can't do (fail + induce unnecessary suffering). In cases where residential schools and the like got really nasty, I suspect the latter was a big part of the problem.

Am I totally off here?

I read his post as

  1. Some people really are better off in one or another dimension. A true race-blind society would let individuals sexually select for the dimensions they value. Ultimately, the whole population would tend towards preferred traits in all dimensions.

I think there are some problems with this theory. It obviously still allows for an underclass, disfavored by almost all mates. Is this “racist?” Either way, it kind of imports all the usual hazards of conventional eugenics.

It obviously still allows for an underclass, disfavored by almost all mates.

When you aren't subsidising and heavily encouraging reproduction in said underclass, from a HBD perspective the problem solves itself after a few generations. You don't have to do anything particularly evil to make a population that can't reproduce fast enough to sustain itself go away - and the ones that do survive are going to be better matches for whatever you're actually selecting for to boot.

When you aren't subsidising and heavily encouraging reproduction in said underclass, [...] you don't have to do anything particularly evil

How does one actually encourage reproduction? If you know any tricks, please share them and save the west.

The way you phrased it, the only way I can think of to stop encouraging the reproduction of an underclass is to literally let them starve. Humans will breed in incredibly destitute circumstances, I suspect the worse their lot the more fecund they become.

Or are you actually suggesting to make them so rich as to voluntarily stop breeding, the Gates gambit?

But this seems to suggest to get to a better answer we need to mate the less smart with the more smart instead of the more smart with the more smart. Why isn’t the latter preferred?

Giraffes didn't get long necks by magic or genetic drift. They got them by breeding with Giraffes with long necks!

My point- what this whole conversation is missing- SEXUAL SELECTION IS METALEMARKIAN On a species-wide level, giraffes DID get longer necks by trying to have longer necks!!! So there is good reason to give races opportunity to aspire towards one another's greatness.

Eh? I admit I'm not an expert on giraffe evolution, but I've never heard that they had any sexual selection for long necks. The story I heard was that it was a Red Queen's race with trees, which began growing ever taller so their leaves were out of reach of herbivores, so giraffe ancestors grew taller to compensate.

This is distinct from say, peacock tails, which have no other practical utility.

I'm not sure how sure we are WRT giraffes, or what current consensus is. But there have been some contesting the Red queens race with trees hypothesis, in favor of a sexual selection hypothesis. Centered around their neck based mating battles. Those females just can't get enough of that longneck.

That's kinda of the naive theory, but it's now thought that long necks are also about fighting sexual rivals. Giraffes literally batter each other with their long necks.

There are many variations on a joke about a race blind man refusing to cross the street as a black youth is walking towards him, he then gets mugged by the black youth. In more recent times the joke is often subverted to turn the race expectations on their head. Anyways, it is a good example for my purposes. Let us break the situation down:

Context - Walking down a dark street at night in a bad section of town. Age - young, teen to late twenties. A time when humans are often physically at their peak, and a time when males are more prone to violence. Gender - male, as mentioned above more prone to violence and physicality. Clothes - You are often left to paint the picture for yourself in the joke. But imagine a dark hoody and well worn jeans. Demeanor - fixated at you, arrogant walk, one hand holding something in their hoody pocket. At this point, without race ever being a factor, you can make an informed decision that interacting with this person is a bad idea. If you can't tell their race, and then are suddenly able to see it at the last moment, no result should change the informed decision you already made.

I won't make the very strong claim that Race is never a useful deciding factor...

It doesn't take very many changes, nor does it take rare or unusual changes to make race highly salient. Let's take it outside of the dark street in a bad section of town; should I be more concerned by a black guy than a white guy that fits this description on Michigan Avenue in Chicago? I think so. Let's remove the demeanor and neighborhood, but hold all else constant - would you feel more threatened by a young black man than a young Asian man in a hoodie? Let's keep everything the same, but flip the gender - are black women more threatening than women of Hmong descent? Let's change almost everything and update to a guy in his 40s approaching me in a grocery store parking lot - surely you'd think race is at least somewhat informative on how this interaction is likely to go?

Basically, I think you stacked the deck to be as substantially bad of a situation as possible and followed up with, "well, a white guy that fits all of the worst characteristics you can think of is bad too". Sure. Fair. I would definitely avoid a threatening looking Chinese guy with a weapon in a neighborhood known for Triad gang activity. I'm also a lot less likely to encounter that than the various black permutations, to the point where 6.6% my state is black and they account for 67% of my state's murders. On the grocery store example above, where I'm unlikely to be targeted for violence, I can guess with a high degree of certainty that the black guy is going to be asking me for money.

Now, perhaps morally I should elect to hear that guy out either way, maybe he really does just need $10 for a can of gas, but it surely informs my decision-making process.

Let's take it outside of the dark street in a bad section of town; should I be more concerned by a black guy than a white guy that fits this description on Michigan Avenue in Chicago? I think so.

I can't speak for Chicago. But for Ireland? The US Department of State has recently issued a travel advisory to tourists coming to Ireland about being wary, and it's because of this incident.

A bunch of our own home-grown little scumbags, all teenagers, at least one of them a minor - and nobody is black. So if the argument is "black people are inherently stupider/more violent than white people", that may or may not be - but whether they're white or black or brown, avoiding guys in hoodies is a good idea.

So if the argument is "black people are inherently stupider/more violent than white people"

It isn't. I've read enough history to be confident that there's plenty of white-on-white violence. Nothing in my post even hints in the direction of whether behavior is substantially innate to a group or not, and whether it's innate or learned isn't relevant to my assessment of risk. My objection in the context of the few hundred miles around me is that race absolutely has substantial predictive value with regard to random crime or semi-random interpersonal violence. Again, if you stack the deck sufficiently, you can make that particular risk factor negligible. Yes, I'm well aware that if I'm wearing a shirt that says, "United Ireland" on it, I should regard a white guy with a Red Hand tattoo as plausibly threatening. Likewise, I'm not going to go to the bank and freak out when there's a black guy helping me set up my account. There are, however, plenty of situations in the middle where the information is relevant and I'm disinclined to pretend otherwise for the sake of social improvement.

I don't know that any of what you said really changes based on race, though, at least from a practical perspective. Yeah, black guy approaching me in a grocery store parking lot is probably going to ask me for money. But I can't think of many situations where I white guy doing the same thing doesn't end the same way.

Even the canonical example of an urban looking black guy being treated suspiciously for walking around a white suburban neighborhood at night doesn't make sense when you think about it. Yeah, black people commit more crime in general. But most of that crime isn't committed in white suburbs. Disaffected urban youth who want to rob houses aren't likely to drive 45 minutes to an unfamiliar neighborhood where they'd be about as inconspicuous as a brontosaurus at a time when the home is all but guaranteed to be occupied. The modal burglary takes place in the middle of a weekday by a guy driving a panel van who doesn't linger too long. But no one ever reports those guys as suspicious because they're so inconspicuous.

Yeah, my priors are that a black guy approaching me in a parking lot wants money for a gas can and a white guy could be doing that, or could be trying to sell me amway, with a distant possibility he’s a jehova’s witness. Not a huge difference either way.

Or he's me, and he wasn't paying attention on the way in and has been wandering around for the last ten minutes trying to find the entrance to the shops, and since you have shopping he assumes you can point him in the right direction.

Yeah, black people commit more crime in general. But most of that crime isn't committed in white suburbs.

That's measuring things the wrong way around. The amount of crime black people commit in black neighborhoods is irrelevant to the white suburbanite in a white neighborhood trying to decide whether the black person is a criminal. The relevant probability is P(black person is a criminal | he's in my neighborhood), not P(black person is in my neighborhood | he's committing a crime)

Disaffected urban youth who want to rob houses aren't likely to drive 45 minutes to an unfamiliar neighborhood where they'd be about as inconspicuous as a brontosaurus at a time when the home is all but guaranteed to be occupied.

They do exactly this in my area, though less "disaffected urban youth" and more "organized bands of thieves". Granted, my area is not lily-white so they're less conspicuous than they would be in some places, but they hit towns with fewer black people too.

That is happening near me as well. My area isn’t white, but it is upper class with a mix of white and so called model minorities (eg successful South and East Asians)

It doesn't take very many changes, nor does it take rare or unusual changes to make race highly salient. Let's take it outside of the dark street in a bad section of town; should I be more concerned by a black guy than a white guy that fits this description on Michigan Avenue in Chicago? I think so. Let's remove the demeanor and neighborhood, but hold all else constant - would you feel more threatened by a young black man than a young Asian man in a hoodie? Let's keep everything the same, but flip the gender - are black women more threatening than women of Hmong descent? Let's change almost everything and update to a guy in his 40s approaching me in a grocery store parking lot - surely you'd think race is at least somewhat informative on how this interaction is likely to go?

I think in most situations there are other pieces of information that tell you a lot more than race. Certainly it is possible to construct a hypothetical scenario where you remove a bunch of those other pieces of information and race becomes more and more important. I think focusing on race to the detriment of other pieces of information is the wrong direction to go.

This is basically a fog of war type argument of using bayesian logic. If you have limited information then race can be extremely important. But as you add more information race becomes less important.

The problem with stereotyping is when you can’t update your priors to new information to properly find outliers like Stephon Curry.

Race of course can be quite important for public policy. You will get group level effects if you say choose between taking a million immigrants from an African Country versus a million Cuban refugees or a million Han Chinese fleeing communists. But if instead you IQ test then it wouldn’t matter.

For a tl;dr: you make a lot of fine points, but for some reason tie them to 'race'. Most of these anti-racist arguments therefor end up not being anti-racist at all. They seem more like general individual based introspection arguments. For what it's worth I'm not against any of them specifically, I'm just not sure what they have to do with typical 'racist' thinking which, most of the time, deals with groups and averages.

As an example, from "Taking Responsibility":

Deterministic thinking is not specific to 'racist' thinking. Typical 'I can't' most often heard from children doing homework is a great example of this. On top of that the argument falls over itself when you flip it around. Believing yourself to be destined to lose is bad. But believing yourself to be destined to win is good. It's obvious from this that the 'bad' here is not determinism but self defeatism.

As for your personal maximum capacity for achievement, the argument you make falls to similar issues. The point about 'maximum genetic capacity'(my paraphrasing) is not about you personally, it's about you in relation to others. The reason Usain Bolt could become the world's fastest sprinter is not because of his magic training or the sand in Jamaica. The guy started training very late at 17 and his diet consisted mostly of McNuggets straight from McDonalds. It was his DNA. If you thought you had a genuine chance in competing against him, you were stupid. But if you liked running track, why let that stop you? Just run to see what you can do. The problem here is not 'race' and minimizing it changes nothing. It's our lizard brain competitive spirit trying to outcompete Dunbar's number when in reality it is competing against 7 billion people.

As for "Information and Stereotyping"

Making conceptual arguments about this seems rather pointless. We don't need conceptual arguments to figure out that blacks commit more crime than do whites. On top of that, making the argument individualized further leads us astray from the utility of 'race'. Since 'race and crime' generally refers to populations, not an individual instance in someones life.

To meet your conceptualized argument head on: If I am walking alone at night and there is a guy in a hoody and worn out jeans walking towards me, I'm not going to think he is mugging me. Ever. Because that sort of thing has never happened where I live. Ever. But if you live in the USA in an average black neighborhood, my instincts would be potentially dangerously wrong because the chances are no longer 0. Because average white Scandinavian town and average black USA town are not the same. To that end race is useful. One town is average USA black, the other is average Scandinavian white. You can comb through the finer details but race is still there as a fact of life. Ignoring it would be stupid.

As for "Policy"

The reason affirmative action is bad is because it is trying to fit an unfit population. There is nothing wrong with affirmatively actioning a bunch of otherwise neurotypical 140 IQ people into colleges. They would probably do very well and better the school and society. The problem arises when the population is on average at 85 IQ and demand for 'diversity' outstrips supply of college material people.

If you want 'diversity' there is no magic process that can fix your problem with blacks. Without a mechanism that selects unfit people to meet your 'diversity' quota, you will not meet the quota. Without a program that is designed to cater to these unfit people, you will not see many of them graduate. Without unfair you get less than 1% black at the elite level. With those kind of numbers you will be seeing 'calls to action' against your racist policies.

As for "Immigration"

We are again using conceptual arguments. Why make those arguments imprecise? Here's one: lets have an immigration system that only imports good people we will all personally like who will also benefit the economy and save a child and/or pet in need.

OK, we don't have that. What do we have? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/S00148-017-0636-1

  • We present life cycle estimates of the potential fiscal impact of immigration considering the cost of immigration on the margin as well as on average. The main conclusion is that immigrants from Western countries have a positive fiscal impact, while immigrants from non-Western countries have a large negative one, which is also the case when considering only non-refugee immigrants.

We have information. For some reason, despite race being allegedly irrelevant, geographically isolated population groups perform differently when placed in the same environment. We can theorize a system of import that weeds out the 'bad'. But that still leaves the fact that there are so many bads that they need extensive weeding out when compared to 'Western' people.

What I don't understand is, why do you care so much to ignore this sort of information? You could make a similar case for ignoring anything. Just figure out some proxy for it and voila. But that doesn't change the reality behind it. The kind of systems that functionally racially discriminate against blacks are conducive to healthy and happy western societies. You can dress them up how you want, it doesn't change the fact that people notice. And it's not the white identitarians.

Race is far too predictive for me to give this real credence. I'm only racist because I seek to understand reality, and unfortunately reality is racist as hell.

It's rare indeed that a rational agent is worse off with additional Bayesian evidence, and as mentioned, race is very strong evidence.

It's certainly not everything, as even most HBD-ers would accept, but goddamn do theories for why the world looks the way it does fail utterly without considering it.

As far as I'm concerned, the policy of acknowledging both race and additional information you have about a person is strictly superior to doing the same but ignoring race. I'd be more concerned if a black doctor was treating me since I know about how much AA they receive, I'd be less concerned if the doctor publicized his SAT score or had other objective markers for performance like a specialization in a field where his race counts for nothing (I doubt that's the case in the US, but I could be wrong). This is where AA in general taints by association, said doctor could absolutely be someone who managed to get in without not so subtle nudges, but since they usually lack a way to prove it, they're automatically discounted in the eyes of a rational agent with no additional information.

To use your example of running into a young male in a hoody at night, yes you should be significantly more concerned if he was black, the stats don't lie. Certainly you should avoid being in that situation in the first place, but feel no shame about crossing the street well in advance.

All doctors still have to pass the requirements don't they, regardless of how they get into medical school? Also I don't think it's necessarily linear between SAT and being a good doctor. My guess is you would want a minimum (higher than average) threshold and people at the top would probably specialise in any case. In between hard working, curious, empathetic, life-long learning could circumvent a lot- I don't know how these characteristics distribute but I don't think the average white doctor is that high a bar in the 10 min pharmaceutical dispensing slot I experience them in. Mostly they're just passing on the received wisdom of the medical model.

There was the somewhat recent change in the exam that leads to placements in residencies specifically to address racial differences in test outcomes.

But does it affect the baseline competence test? As far as I can tell, med school does the gating for competence, and residencies were further gatekeeping intended to drive up doctor salaries that weren’t awarded strictly meritocratically to begin with.

Medicine is not so rigorous that there isn't a glaring difference in quality of treatment and outcomes between the a 10th percentile and 90th percentile doctor.

I do still think US doctors are among the best in the world, but you shouldn't settle if you can help it.

The case of AA is actually one of the reasons why I would advise people to not go looking for racial spoils. It doesn't help in the long-term because people re-adjust their expectations (as you have done). The personal narratives involved in receiving that kind of help also seem very toxic to self-achievement. AA is a case where social enforcement of race based beliefs has lead to race based information being more salient, which is one of the caveats I talked about above. The more we make race matter, the more it will matter. The less we make it matter, the less it will matter. And as I said you are not in traffic, you are traffic. Same applies to society.

For understanding the overall world, and its history, it is quite possible that race and genetics are helpful pieces of additional information. I didn't want to commit to race never being useful information. I just don't think most people are engaged in sweeping attempts to understand history.

To use your example of running into a young male in a hoody at night, yes you should be significantly more concerned if he was black, the stats don't lie. Certainly you should avoid being in that situation in the first place, but feel no shame about crossing the street well in advance.

The stats in many ways do lie. Put someone in poverty. Add violence to their upbringing. Have them be young and male. You have a recipe for ciminality. Many of the people in this position in certain countries happen to be black. It is not them being black that is causing them to be criminal. Being able to identify a white person that was raised in these circumstances is purely advantageous.

The clothes and the context are still doing most of the work for you. Change the clothes to a business suit, and be in a nice area of town. Suddenly you being worried about being mugged by the black business man is an absurd level of paranoia and fear on your part.

The stats in many ways do lie. Put someone in poverty. Add violence to their upbringing. Have them be young and male. You have a recipe for ciminality. Many of the people in this position in certain countries happen to be black. It is not them being black that is causing them to be criminal. Being able to identify a white person that was raised in these circumstances is purely advantageous.

You are wrong here three ways, I think. First, even if we assume that only poverty, violence (which came from where, I wonder?), and average age are the only factors that predict criminality, you can't know someone's upbringing, income level, and actual age just by looking at them for a moment. You can know their race. And if it just so happens that there's so much poverty, violence, and demographic distortion in the black community that they do 60% of the murdering, then no, the stats don't lie, you should avoid black people, because when you see black skin you see an indicator of possible violence.

Second, you are simply directly wrong. Go ahead, dig up the stats of people of various races by income level. Let's look at whether the generation of Jews immediately after the holocaust jumped up to black-like levels of violence and criminality. Compare the actual cohorts by age and sex, and show me what those stats look like. Being black doesn't make you a criminal, any more than being drunk makes you get into traffic accidents. Some people can drive drunk just fine, and some people who are perfectly sober kill themselves and others, and you can absolutely find someone who is a better driver drunk that most people are sober. But just like the population of drunk people are much worse drivers overall, the population of black people is much more criminal overall.

Black people are in poverty not because they are discriminated against, but because they're black (and everything that entails on the collective level), just like Jewish people are prospering not because of the protocols of their Zionish elders, but because they're Jewish. The violence in their upbringing is because they are raised by and around other black people, who do that violence, because they are black. They are disproportionately young because they have higher death rates, due both to violence and to poor health outcomes, frequently caused by poor diet and general health maintenance, because they are black.

Well sure. If you don't know everything else about the person you're looking at. But the goal- is to be able to know everything about each person you're looking at so that you don't have to make non-causal inferences. Not just for equity, but because they make you wrong more.

And the counterargument- to what I just said- is that it's hard to do that right? But ultimately I'm right. Right? We'd be right more if we had the resources to just see more layers of the life of the black dude in the alley?

So I'ma go make a social inference AI and get back to you.

I think "presume we still lack access to an AI with near-omniscience in the realm of [x]" is implicit in most discussions. Once your social inference AI exists and we have free access to it, the entire social landscape would transform so much that it's hard to even predict what problems might exist, much less how we'd fix them. How to treat race in that landscape is a very different question than how to treat race in the landscape in which we find ourselves. And without the ability to instantly or even quickly switch from one landscape to the other, we still have to figure out how to interact with each other in this current crude landscape where we lack access to this social inference AI.

Yes. Very understandable. I will not begrudge you that. I am going to keep sitting in my privileged small town and never walking down streets at night and making my social inference AI though. You keep doing you but heads up.

the entire social landscape would transform so much that it's hard to even predict what problems might exist, much less how we'd fix them.

Actually, coming back to this. I would like to get your thoughts. I believe in myself and my ability to make this AI. It will be very tough to get it to the point where it can see a face in a hoodie at night on a dark street and tell you about that guy- But I expect to be able to do a fairly comprehensive background/shared-values/personal-info/interaction-styles/preferences check on all internet figures with consistent usernames that frequently post in servers/sites/subs I visit by year's end.

What I want your thoughts on is- I know you litterally just said "it's hard to even predict what problems might exist, much less how we'd fix them." But this is important. If I succeed I need to be aware that of disruption I cause by distributing this to anyone who wants it and making it simple and easy to one click install on desktop and query via LLM....

I want to know what problems you think I'll be creating as I move forward. I want to be able to solve issues I help create by spreading this level of social awareness. Brainstormed hypotheses are fine here if you don't have strong predictions. It's all worth at least considering. Especially as I begin to automate the consideration and processing of such possibilities.

I'm not sure the "don't pursue AA because people will adjust their expectations" argument holds, since it fails a simple reversal test: would you also be neutral to discrimination? By your logic, discrimination wouldn't hurt a group once people's expectations adjust to be extra-impressed that they managed to overcome it.

The case of AA is actually one of the reasons why I would advise people to not go looking for racial spoils.

Tragedy of the commons - those racial spoils come from the rest of society, which means that if you do not secure some of those racial spoils for yourself you are actually going to be paying for them in all likelihood. I agree that your message would be good if it was a society-wide rule, but it is bad advice if you're in a system where people are already looking for and finding those spoils.

I'd be more concerned if a black doctor was treating me since I know about how much AA they receive

A study on obstetric patient outcomes found that the residency program the doctor attended had a significant effect on patient outcomes. The best residency programs had a 10% chance of complications, vs 13% for the worst.

Adjusting for medical exam scores didn't change the results.

Your reasoning is backwards here. If you believe a black doctor is receiving preferential treatment (such as better residency placement, despite having lower exam scores), you should choose the black doctor.

I have great idea then! Let's let everybody into the best residency program, without any tests, or regard how well they do there. We'll have a whole society full of great doctors!

I'm not really sure what your "gotcha" is. You only get into a residency program after you've passed the USMLE and per the paper:

We found no evidence for a major selection effect in residency program output. If programs differ substantially in the quality of physicians they graduate, much of that difference might be attributable to the initial quality of the trainees they attract, but we found little difference in effects after adjustment for individual physicians' standardized medical licensure examination Z scores. This suggests either that these scores do not capture medical students' clinical ability or that skills developed during residency training are more important for producing good maternal outcomes than skills developed during medical school, and residency programs differ in skill development.

If we could feasibly let everybody who passed their exams into the best residency programs - we would. It would probably lead to better patient outcomes.

It's magical thinking, refuted by Goodhart's Law.

The first problem is that the idea that the residency programs themselves act as filters doesn't even occur them. It shows how much these people are stuck in a bubble.

The second problem is this:

If we could feasibly let everybody who passed their exams into the best residency programs - we would

If passing the exam is a pre-filter that residency programs rely on, and you'll give people of a particular race a boost that let them pass an exam they otherwise wouldn't, that's going to mess the pre-filter.

It would probably lead to better patient outcomes.

A hypothesis that is very easy to check - find some of the worst doctors that managed to hang on to a licence, send them to the best residency programs, and see what happens. I have no patience for people who fish for correlations (or lack therefor) anymore.

The first problem is that the idea that the residency programs themselves act as filters doesn't even occur them. It shows how much these people are stuck in a bubble.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by filter here. They pretty explicitly call this out as a possibility - which is why they account for exam scores.

A hypothesis that is very easy to check - find some of the worst doctors that managed to hang on to a licence, send them to the best residency programs, and see what happens.

Why bother with testing the residency program at all in this scenario? You should see doctors from the best medical schools performing considerably better than those from lower ranked ones - but that isn’t really true either.

I don’t think OP implies that at all.

The point is not that exam scores can be disregarded. It’s that they don’t matter conditional on the good residency. Whatever combination of test scores and AA and resume-padding gets you into that residency—that’s still important.

The question becomes how much AA is practiced in getting into residencies. If there is AA practiced at medical school but much less at residency, then it may be that residencies themselves aren’t that skill building but are separating the wheat from the chaff.

Right.

No idea what the demographics look like among these residencies, though.

Assuming aptitude is normally distributed and doesn't contain any ceilings for some races, if you filter you applicants beforehand with a threshhold, race loses its predictive power. Of course this only works without concepts like affirmative action:

If the threshhold is 130 IQ, than the share of <140 IQ and >140 IQ will the same for blacks as for whites. The only difference willl be that whites will have a big positive multiplies for both sets.

Or phrased differently, P(130<IQ<135) / P(135<IQ) should be equal regardless of race

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Is that really true? Consider a threshold of 0 IQ (so 6 std dev below the mean). No-one (well, 1 in a billion) is excluded by this, but as the sets are the same, if there was predictive power before, there is after.

This would be true for an exponential distrubution but it is false for a normal distribution

This is incorrect. Even with a cutoff, whites would have a higher average IQ.

With a standard distribution, group differences will be amplified among outliers.

About 5.9% of people who are above +2 deviations will also be above +3.

Only about 2.3% of people who are above +3 deviations will also be above +4.

I encourage you to calculate these numbers yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule

I encourage you to calculate these numbers yourself:

Should've just done it in advance. Lesson learned, thanks for the correction

Suppose that Pop A has mean 100, sigma 15 and Pop B has mean 85, sigma 15.

The ratio shown above is not the same for the two populations. If the cutoff is 85 and the high mark is 100 instead, this is obvious without computing Z-scores.

The notion that conditioning on a threshold can wash away differences in mean is wrong intuitively and its wrongness can be expressed formulaically and precisely, but I also did a quick simulation to confirm because why not.

Suppose we have a population with a mean of 100 (stand-in for white) and a second population with a mean of 85 (stand-in for black) for a given trait (e.g., IQ), both with standard deviations of 15. (1 - normcdf(140, 100, 15))/(1 - normcdf(130, 100, 15)) is about 16.8%. (1 - normcdf(140, 85, 15))/(1 - normcdf(130, 85, 15)) is about 9.1%. So whites have almost twice as much of those over 140 than blacks.

I generated 10 million hypothetical individuals for each population as a check, and got the same figures out to the digits shown in the percentages.

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.

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.

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..

You’re barking up the wrong tree there brother. I am convinced by our other regular HBD posters of the unfortunate truth that blacks are much lower IQ and this is not fixable, but I couldn’t point out specifically the case for it. Daseindustries or hoffmeister might have a better ability to answer your questions.

I come from a Socratic mindset. It pays not to believe anyone unless you have travelled sufficiently on your own journey to confirm them. This is hard work mind you.

HBD has been done to death in this forum. It's kinda like going on to an atheist sub and asking for a proof of evolution when everyone knows that God created the world in 6 days. They're probably not going to answer this question for the millionth time.

Start from here. Do you believe that genetics play a role in sprinting speed? Why wouldn't they also play a role in intelligence?

HBD can never be proven correct, nor can blank slate theory. But the overwhelming preponderance of evidence is on the side of HBD, as is basic common sense.

Yes, absolutely - a range of physical talents have genetic basis. And why shouldn't different kinds of intelligence have genetic elements. Fine, it is the coarse theory I'm critiquing which ends up with some people in a Victorian hierarchy of being argument l. Human intelligence is multifaceted and overlaps with culture. Why has IQ gone up over time, why is it I can increase my IQ from practice? What is the genetics of a mixed race person in HBD, what level of mixing do different groups have, how much is adaptation to environment over shorter timescales, how well does the tail reflect mean behaviour.

Do you really believe common sense is a reliable scientific guide. Phrenology was once accepted. I'm open to inquiry in this space but I've noticed people prefer the axiomatic assumptions than thinking about it.

In reference to a previous conversation Im not race blind but I don't get the hate boner people carry, sometimes over their lifetimes, around race. If you're going to make a strong claim, you need strong evidence.

I'm not going to give the case for HBD because it's been done to death here and I'm not the best person to do.

So let's talk about phrenology instead!

Phrenology, of course, is mostly wrong. But is it common sense? Not in the slightest. In fact, it's the furthest thing from common sense. Why would the bumps on someone's head make them evil. That's not common sense.

Phrenology is instead a pseudoscience, meaning that it uses the trappings of science without the actual scientific method. It's worth pointing out that a lot of modern research, especially in psychology, is so poor as to fall under the realm of pseudoscience as well. Remember "stereotype threat"?

But here's something a phrenologist might say which is common sense: "People with bigger brains are smarter". As it turns, out this is actually true. Brain volume has about a 0.3 correlation with intelligence, explaining about 10% of variance in intelligence. Note how bad the media reporting was on this topic as well.

https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/brain-size-and-intelligence-2022

That's a nice philosophic distinction and I actually think there is a common sense we can moor to. I don't know how people, scientists actually thought of phrenology, perhaps it was more in the not-obvious science can tell us realm. What tends to happen I would guess is that established ideas can become 'common sense' over time, even if wrong.

Why would the bumps on someone's head make them evil. That's not common sense.

It's not common sense now, because everyone now knows that phrenology is balderdash. But once you know that intelligence and personality reside in the brain, but don't know exactly what the anatomy and function of each part of the brain is, it seems quite natural to believe different personalities are due to different brains → differences in the physical shape of the brain correspond to differences in personality → differences in a particular area of the brain correspond to differences in a particular aspect of personality, e.g. time preference or empathy → differences in the shape of the brain correspond to visible differences in the shape of the braincase → observing the shape of the skull allows one to make specific inferences about its owner's personality.

Thinking you can predict someone's propensity to, say, alcoholism, by the shape of their skull is not inherently less commonsensical than thinking you can predict it from their genes. A priori, there's a perfectly plausible causal path either way. That's why you need to proceed with actual scientific research instead of stopping at common sense.

It sounds like we agree for the most part. Knowing that thought originates in the brain, common sense would indicate that statistical analysis of human brains would yield insights. And indeed it has! Larger brains are correlated with higher IQ.

But phrenology was not that! There was no rigor. There was no analysis. It was just making shit up, similar to astrology. It's not common sense to make wild conclusions based on tiny shreds of evidence.

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Incidentally, just in: Century-Old Paradigm Overturned – Brain Shape Matters More Than Neural Connectivity

For over a hundred years, scientists have held the belief that our thoughts, feelings, and dreams are shaped by the way various brain regions interact via a vast network of trillions of cellular connections.

However, a recent study led by the team at Monash University’s Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health has examined more than 10,000 distinct maps of human brain activity and discovered that the overall shape of an individual’s brain has a much more substantial impact on our cognitive processes, emotions, and behavior than its intricate neuronal connectivity.

The study, recently published in the prestigious journal, Nature draws together approaches from physics, neuroscience, and psychology to overturn the century-old paradigm emphasizing the importance of complex brain connectivity, instead identifying a previously unappreciated relationship between brain shape and activity.

“We have long thought that specific thoughts or sensations elicit activity in specific parts of the brain, but this study reveals that structured patterns of activity are excited across nearly the entire brain, just like the way in which a musical note arises from vibrations occurring along the entire length of a violin string, and not just an isolated segment,” he said.

“We found that eigenmodes defined by brain geometry––its contours and curvature––represented the strongest anatomical constraint on brain function, much like the shape of a drum influences the sounds that it can make,” said Professor Fornito.

“Using mathematical models, we confirmed theoretical predictions that the close link between geometry and function is driven by wave-like activity propagating throughout the brain, just as the shape of a pond influences the wave ripples that are formed by a falling pebble,” he said.

Huh! The more you know! I guess phrenologists just had to sound it a little with some sticks or something, to tell the shape of the drum under the skull. Or maybe make some sacrifices… for science! They were so close…

Oh, those functional connectomics researchers with their contrived mathematical mumbo-jumbo must be getting real uncomfortable now, the silly geese!

Check this out @ShariaHeap @orca-covenant

(I haven't actually verified if the paper makes sense, but the writing is just hilarious with all those repeated metaphors, it reads like a GPT-generated shitpost for Sneerclub)

That's a wild concept, phrenology indeed, perhaps skull transplants or 'brain moulding' could be the way to go... The link up to phrenology is indeed quite hilarious given the recent discussions..! Everything in circles perhaps

Why has IQ gone up over time

The scores on some tests have increased, but the major figures seem to believe that this is due to cultural change, and that in other tests, scores have not increased. The scores with less cultural influence have seen no increase, for example.

why is it I can increase my IQ from practice?

Supposedly, practice can increase the IQ score on one test but will not have an effect on a test that you have not studied for. For example, reaction time is a measure of IQ and learning more vocabulary does not increase your reaction time (citation needed).

What is the genetics of a mixed race person in HBD,

HBDers spend a lot of time showing that mixed-race people have the IQs that are the weighted sum of their constituent races. The more white admixture, the high the IQ, etc. They look at this at the gene level rather than relying on physical features. I have no idea how valid this work is.

what level of mixing do different groups have

African Americans are about 15% white admixture, for example. This is fairly easy to measure.

how well does the tail reflect mean behaviour.

Given the population size, the distribution is fairly normal. The standard deviations may vary, of course.

These seem all a bit rote, and again don't really address much complexity. If I can practice and improve on a test then there is a cultural element. You mention speed reaction can't be trained for, but I'm assuming elite black athletes have superior scores on these, does this imply that blacks have superior native intelligence on aspects of intelligence?

Populations at the level of black v white v mixed are mixed of genetic lineages. This means tail genetics doesn't have to relate to median genetics.

Your genetic pot analogy seems a bit naive scientifically. To infer a causal relationship I'm going to need a bit more in terms of genetics.

My beef isn't that there's 'nothing there', just that the complexity is not engaged with, which implies a dunning-kruger potential. I am a scientist so I'm actually interested in the complexity and science. Others aren't interested in this but in making blanket statements about groups of people (with immense intragroup genetic variation), which overindexes on skin attributes.

You mention speed reaction can't be trained for, but I'm assuming elite black athletes have superior scores on these,

Why do you assume this? I will look up the results. Lynn claims that black children have slower choice time but faster movement times. IQ is related to choice time (I am told, but I have not seen anyone doubt this.).

Lynn concludes:

The result suggests that around one-third of the white advantage on intelligence tests may lie in faster information processing capacity.

Populations at the level of black v white v mixed are mixed of genetic lineages. This means tail genetics doesn't have to relate to median genetics.

I don't understand what you mean. Sorry.

Your genetic pot analogy seems a bit naive scientifically.

The idea that there would be a linear relationship comes from the assumption (or observation?) that intelligence is influenced by many genes. This is fairly well accepted in other areas. I don't know any arguments why it would not apply to intelligence, but that might be my failure.

the complexity is not engaged with

If you were around a few years ago, there was a lot of complexity, but I did not pay that much attention, and the major proponents don't post anymore.

For an example of engaging with the question, have a look at this paper. I have not checked the data, the analysis, or even if the study they are using ever happened, but it shows the kind of reasoning that HBDers do. They take seriously the kind of questions you ask.

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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.

what the evidence base is for isolated genetic pools over long history.

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.

I think ‘g is useful but not always that useful so the opportunity costs from it sometimes select against higher IQ’s’ is a reasonable explanation. And it seems pretty apparent that high IQ people start having sex later and sleep around less when they do, so you already have an evolutionarily-relevant opportunity cost built in.

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.

Aboriginals have been isolated for 50k years. That is a few thousand generations which is long enough for fairly drastic changes. Whether or not there was enough difference in selective pressure is unclear to me.

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.

The homo floresiensis had tiny brains and it is possible that they traded size for more calorie efficiency. I see claims that they used stone tools, but my sense is that people think they were much dumber than regular humans. A very calorie-restricted location, like an island, can lead to miniaturization of a species, and this can make them trade off seemingly useful talents, like intelligence, for reasons of efficiency.

how long do homogeneous populations exist

I think that there will always be clines, and this is visible in England for example, where the East Coast is noticeably blonder than the West. On the other hand, the longer the separation the bigger the differences will be. Some chance is involved, as the difference between Celts and Scandanvians shows. Both are obviously selected for very pale skin over the last 5 to 10 thousand years, but one group became uniformly blonde while the other got quite a bit of red hair. Selecting for less pigment, presumably to absorb enough vitamin D not to have horrible rickets, can be done by many mutations. Some claim that blonde hair spread by sexual selection as well, which is obviously culturally bound.

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.

The major categorization, sub Saharan, New World, Aboriginal, Asian, EMEA is based on large geographical features that blocked population flow. It looks from DNA results that people in the past were more similar than they are now. For example, early Celts were brown-skinned. Once we collect more DNA, this will be obvious, I suppose. As far as I know, there are good reasons to believe that much of the differences in genetics between Asia and Europe are due to selection after leaving Africa. I think that groups in Africa have more diversity and some of this is due to Africa bing inhabited longer. The San and the Pygmies separated very 110kya ago, before humans left Africa. The other splits are earlier.

The San and Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic, and Nilo-Saharan lineages were substantially diverged by 160 kya (thousand years ago).

Humans left Africa 60 to 90k years ago, so these split predate that quite a bit.

There are arguments that claim to distinguish when divergence occurred and to be able to tell whether it was due to the founding population or not. I skipped that part.

Ah ha, excellent - you're very modest in your appraisal. Plenty to digest here..

Some chance is involved, as the difference between Celts and Scandanvians shows. Both are obviously selected for very pale skin over the last 5 to 10 thousand years, but one group became uniformly blonde while the other got quite a bit of red hair.

I don’t think this is true- there’s no shortage of either red haired Scandinavians or blonde Irishmen. And in fact phenotypically Norwegians and Irish are very difficult to distinguish.

Finland has 2% red hair, while Ireland has 10% and Scotland 13%. This is not quite as big a difference as I expected and presumably comes down to judging what counts as red hair. To have red hair in Ireland requires a lot, while the Finns might have a weaker threshold. With a weaker threshold, Ireland increases to 30%, with this being more common across the Shannon.

80% of Finns are blonde, while "A range of 27%-30% of Irish females have blonde hair, while for males it is much lower: 20%".

I would guess these numbers have changed significantly recently due to immigration. In the past, Ireland had essentially no people with brown eyes. Growing up, I knew two who I met in college. Van Morrison wrote a song "Brown Eyed Girl" when he met one on a train in London, as he was struck by how unusual it was. (Actually, this is the story Van told me, but it seems he has reneged on it, so whatever). In 1952, 0.43% of Irish people had brown eyes, and these were obviously immigrants.

The blondes in Ireland are probably partially from Viking invasions (or immigration, if you like) or related sexual tourism.

phenotypically Norwegians and Irish are very difficult to distinguish.

I would guess you are neither. There was a time I could reliably tell a Cavan man from someone from the King's County (the king in question was Phillip II of Spain). I doubt I could still do that, unless they both were farmers.

No offense but there is just too much material too readily available to go through this again. look it up on /r/heredity

what the evidence base is for isolated genetic pools over long history..

How long? What do you mean by "isolated"? And why would it matter, like, how do you infer the plausible rate of genetic divergence in relevant traits to say whether it's been long and isolated enough? Your questions and implicit objections carry assumptions which would be quite laborious to justify, yet you do not feel the need to do it. You should, just for curiosity's sake. Consider the issue with identical ancestors point. It is often brought up by blank slatists as evidence that genetic pools could not have been all that isolated.

In 2004, Rohde, Olson and Chang showed through simulations that, given the false assumption of random mate choice without geographic barriers, the Identical Ancestors Point for all humans would be surprisingly recent, on the order of 5,000-15,000 years ago. … considering the ancestral populations alive at 5000 BC, close to the ACA point, a modern-day Japanese person will get 88.4% of their ancestry from Japan, and most of the remainder from China or Korea, with only 0.00049% traced to Norway; conversely, a modern-day Norwegian will get over 92% of their ancestry from Norway (or over 96% from Scandinavia) and only 0.00044% from Japan.

Okay, so over the last ≈180 generations, the Japanese human has been overwhelmingly molded by selection pressures peculiar to Japan. Is that a lot or not? Suppose that over that time the Japanese have improved their genotypic cognitive ability over baseline by 1/3rd of a standard deviation (5 IQ points), 36 generations per point. Assume intelligence is only 50% heritable (this is a very modest model) and intelligence in that environment over that time span has an average +0.1 correlation with number of surviving offspring. Is that too little or not? Is it plausible that in Siberia there was only a +0.05 correlation?

When is G not useful in an environment.

If you think about it, there are many traits apparently useful in all environments – perfect immune system, height, muscle power, running ability and so on. Yet we do not have invincible immune systems nor are we all maximally tall and strong, and there are clear differences between groups (when was the last time a Japanese bested an Icelander in a competition of strongmen?). The most important drawback for all such traits is opportunity cost; and most differences in human phenotypes are not due to evolving new adaptations but simply due to different tradeoffs when preserving beneficial alleles across traits.

I am happy to profess quite a lot of ignorance, but given the scale of the subject matter I think it's something other people should be admitting to as well.

I just think when someone claims superiority based on genetics we should expect a very sophisticated evidence base with all the causal parts in place, and most importantly, acknowledgement of uncertainty and gaps in understanding.

Being wary of our history on 'science proves this about X race' is one of the very few things I align with woke anti-colonials about.

The question of how much isolation is needed is a good one, also how quickly evolutionary adaptation can take place. I take the points about evolutionary trade-offs, these seem very relevant.

I may be applying a critical lens to HBD but I'm open minded about enquiry. But jeez there's an awful lot of stuff I'd want to know about before I came down on one side or another.

I just think when someone claims superiority based on genetics we should expect a very sophisticated evidence base with all the causal parts in place

First, HBD is usually not a «claim of superiority» in some global sense. I find it extremely wrong that White hereditarians aren't cut any slack for admitting that they are, in terms of genotypic cognitive potential, middling relative to Jews (who are massively dominant per capita) and East Asians (who are even more numerous than White people; nitpicking about muh creative European geniuses has bearing on historical prestige and such, but is largely irrelevant to aggregate population quality). This fact is more crucial to understanding the world than 13/51 type stuff, but gets just dismissed out of hand as some bad faith gotcha. The relative advantage of those groups is also not scrutinized as problematic, but just attributed to virtues like hard work and «culture of learning» (though Asians were covertly discriminated against in higher ed). This shows that the discourse is captured by special interests which only care to assert that «underperforming minorities» in the US are the Main Characters of history, and if they underperform Whites, it can only be for external reasons.

Second, I do not agree that claims of genetic superiority are more inherently suspicious than the alternative hypothesis, which is more or less «hateful conspiracy in plain sight spanning hundreds of millions of people», that is, moral inferiority; vague theorizing about «systemic racism» and «implicit bias» can only go so far to downplay the inescapable claim that White people are, in the current year, acting in an ethnocentric manner to abuse their non-White countrymen. I think people who promote this view do not defend or caveat its wildly libellous implications nearly enough, and must be pressed to do so.

In short, I disagree with the mainstream evaluation of which hypothesis is null, which claim is more extraordinary, and accordingly the assessment of the appropriate burden of proof. And if «'science proves this about X race'» is generally problematic, we must at the very least normalize agnosticism about causes of differences – not say that Science Has Spoken and all races have equal aptitude (ergo race Y is just oppressive, since differences remain).

Of course I'm not agnostic; IMO this horse is very dead. It's been dead since 2012 at the latest. You can just search HBD on this site and get this thread or this comment. Or go through these sources.

I'm not sure you realize how annoying it is to see that the response to HBD «facts that need to be explained» has been to simply make laypeople more confused. For example you ask «what about Flynn effect». What about Flynn effect, indeed? We don't have a reason to think it's relevant to the problem of between-group differences, it happens for everyone at basically the same rate. Likewise for isolated genetic pools; it's not relevant, virtually nothing depends on their existence. How did you arrive at the contrary prior, can you carefully try to trace it? My guess: you think that intelligence, in the HBD model, is mostly dependent on some specific adaptive variants that have emerged among the «superior stock» and failed to spread (in reality, it seems that the same core set of variants is present in all major groups; lower predictive power of European-derived PGS should be due to linkage disequilibrium, as usual). But where did you get that idea from in the first place? Probably just osmosis.

I don't hold it against you, getting reasonable priors would take purposeful work. It's just a thankless job to argue a scientifically nontrivial point against priors that have not been reflected upon. I hope you skim some of the links above.

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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

Why would that be suspicious at all? g is not an unalloyed good, and there's a reason that evolution hasn't turbocharged it beyond what we have now. Even in modern societies the effect of IQ on reproductive success is complicated, to say the least.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797612473119

We found that individuals with high IQ show high environmental influence on IQ into adolescence (resembling younger children), whereas individuals with low IQ show high heritability of IQ in adolescence (resembling adults), a pattern consistent with an extended sensitive period for intellectual development in more-intelligent individuals. The pattern held across a cross-sectional sample of almost 11,000 twin pairs and a longitudinal sample of twins, biological siblings, and adoptive siblings.

Higher IQ people are more sensitive to the environment while growing up, and that "extended sensitive period" actually represents a serious trade-off in some places. If you're growing up in subsaharan Africa, the combination of a longer development period, larger cranium (cranium size is weakly correlated with IQ) causing potential issues during childbirth, social issues that emerge from difficulties relating to people several SDs away from you in IQ and the (potential, haven't found a good study yet but seems plausible) higher nutrition requirements of higher IQ brains means that a lot of mutations which would lead to an increase in g actually decrease reproductive fitness in many contexts, especially ones where physical violence is a daily reality. Modern societies where you can live in an extended adolescent period until your 20s and then transform a high IQ into vast amounts of financial resources/reproductive success are incredibly new, evolutionarily speaking, and it takes at least two generations for changes in selective pressure like that to start being noticeable.

Lots of good stuff here to think about. Among different isolated niches one can imagine different things playing off and there are always trade-off relationships.

There's plenty to check out, re nutrition requirements but I suppose not having the research base some of it feels a bit 'just so' to me, not to say that it's definitively wrong.

Some of the things you point out re brains and the hip, brain-size, plasticity trade-off could be argued either way. These are the key evolutionary advantages of humans in the first place. This is what allowed cognition, communication, cooperation and group cognition/culture. My understanding of lineage arguments is that advantages in group cooperation were key in strategic specialisation that were advantage in circumstances of resource competition and violence/warfare. The group/culture interacts then with evolutionary adaptation so that specialisation and cognitive, group niches could develop, presumably with systems of caring for young, which it should be noted for humans are universally vulnerable irrespective of intelligence.

G is a measure of cognition and at first blush should confer strategic advantages even in times of violence.

There's plenty to check out, re nutrition requirements but I suppose not having the research base some of it feels a bit 'just so' to me, not to say that it's definitively wrong.

If you can find someone willing to back a study on this topic I'd be more than happy to quit my day-job and put on a lab-coat, but in the modern west I'd probably have more luck funding a study on the unconventional feminism of Adolf Hitler than one which could be uncharitably described as explaining the precise mechanisms behind African stupidity and violence (that's not how I view it but it is absolutely how an academic review board would).

G is a measure of cognition and at first blush should confer strategic advantages even in times of violence.

You're right here when you view g in a vacuum. But what happens when that higher g means that you're developmentally behind all of your peers when it comes to physical instrumentality during extremely important stages of your life and development? Sure you might be a much better leader for the tribe in the long run, but good luck convincing the chief that he should abdicate to this weird nerd who isn't even that great at stealing cattle from the neighbouring tribes. That's the point of bringing up those trade-offs - while there are definitely environments and culture that select for higher g, there are also environments and cultures that select against the trade-offs required for that higher g. It is my contention that some of the same mutations and alleles which lead towards higher g impose handicaps during development which impose significant penalties on reproductive success in the kind of brutal Hobbesian environments that you find in a lot of prehistory, and hence evolution will not simply turbocharge g at the cost of everything else.

Of course in the long run optimising for g wins out and societies which select for it eventually acquire overwhelming asymmetrical advantages over those that prioritise nothing but personal, physical violence and charisma, but the nature of the problem means that low g human societies aren't really going to select for g until the environment forces them to. It isn't like our modern society is immune to these pressures either - go look up the data on the correlation between IQ and the number of children/sexual partners one has in the modern day.

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When is G not useful in an environment.

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:

Even the tiny quarter-pound pygmy marmoset, the world’s smallest monkey, devotes as much of its body energy to the brain as we do. Photo by Max Pixel.

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.

I see no reason why a racial group's lack of ability should get them preferential treatment. And there are harsher options than "repress sporadic violent outbursts".

Yes, in justice affirmative action is not morally obligatory. But given the facts(that is, a distinctive sub population which on average will never be able to compete with the white majority and which already has an ethnonarcisistic messiah complex and which can’t be fully assimilated for structural reasons) at hand it’s certainly preferable to bringing back Jim Crow.

Yes, in justice affirmative action is not morally obligatory.

"Affirmative action", being racial discrimination, is not just "not morally obligatory" but morally disfavored.

Jim Crow was also racial discrimination.

As for the subpopulation, if they want to cause trouble, I'm all for treating them as any troublemakers would be, by repressing any violent outbursts. That they are intransigent does not mean everyone else is obliged to yield; a contest of force is a reasonable and IMO superior alternative.


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