This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I agree losing phonics is bad, but throughout the phonics discussion a consistent theme is 'for better-off kids, they don't need phonics, they'll learn to read anyway. for worse-off kids, they need phonics'. It's imagined the worse-off kids are so because their parents aren't teaching them to read at home. I think 'innate capacity for intelligence' is as big of a factor here.
All of the remaining interventions we have are ones that apply equally to both white and black kids. And we can tell because the IQ gap remains at higher deciles, with both rich and poor black parents. There are a lot of black millionaires, yet no black nobel prize winners.
(also, genes-cause-individual-differences is more important here. Many black kids learn to read fine without phonics. Many, more as a percent than black, white kids learn to read without phonics. If we divide the population up into '<90iq' and '>90iq', the differences in outcomes between the two are so much starker than the differences between white and blacks.)
What is the value of discussing the educational cap of students, when we have solid reasons to believe that we have not hit the educational cap?
We know that Black families completely collapsed. We are pretty sure that this was due to an environmental intervention, because it happened very dramatically, and very suddenly. We are even pretty sure we know what that intervention was: the introduction of no-fault divorce, which did exactly what its critics said it would do, and worse besides. You can claim that blacks are more predisposed to dysfunction than whites; maybe this is true. But the current system is not a physical law, nor even a particularly good idea, and we know for a fact that better results are possible under different systems, because we saw better results before we implemented this system.
Ditto for education and crime and every other damn thing.
And sure, Blacks had relatively worse outcomes previously, all the way back to slavery, but it is my understanding that the gaps do in fact widen and narrow over time, rather than being fixed. Black crime is ~30% worse than it was three years ago. That is not a small increase! It is definately environmental!
It's not as though HBD is some option we are forced into by hard political realities. It is very nearly the least plausible political avenue in all of American politics. It is a dead-end, a kill-zone, the fucking Valley of Death. It offers no practical solutions, no path forward, no actual workable plan. As the above discussion shows, it does not even retain the virtue of honesty, because it is appealed to as a "last resort" by people who claim that no environmental intervention works, while fucking ignoring environmental interventions that absolutely work, specifically because they don't like them.
This behavior displeases me, and I think it deserves to be called out.
I agree that black crime is clearly not a genetic inevitability independent of culture, and is basically cultural. White people of similar incomes or similar IQs commit crime at lower rates. Black crime and crime culture would end quickly if the state/elites were willing to use sufficient force to end it and change the culture (and no democratic constituency successfully opposed it). You could draw a parallel to criminal gangs of other cultures in american history that have since assimilated and now have low crime rates.
I think there probably is an indirect genetic contribution to single motherhood, as lower IQ whites also have higher rates of that, but that is also mostly cultural, and could easily be another way, as it was in the past.
I do think most of the black-white IQ gap is genetic, though. As intuitive evidence - there's a wide variety in black experience of America. Quite a few rich black families, 20% of black households have 100k+ income. Why are there so few high-achieving black scientists (and so many jewish ones)? And white kids in single-parent homes - I haven't seen this, but I'd strongly suspect they score better than black kids in similar single-parent homes with similar incomes. I think poor schools impact white and black kids of similar incomes/IQs in about the same way, and the gap remains between them (and of course IQ impacts income somewhat).
We can do embryo selection right now and add '3-8 points' to the 2% of children already born via IVF (by choosing which embryo to implant based on genetic screens, instead of randomly). As technology improves over the next few decades, this kind of thing will just become better and more widely available. (but AI will improve faster, :|)
(Also, we could just have smarter parents donate sperm or sperm/eggs for surrogacy or adopt out babies. This is obviously unworkable as a general policy, because people want to raise their own children. I agree this has all sorts of bad second-order effects, but you can't just notice them and declare it bad, and I think it is probably net positive if you compare the benefits of 'more very smart people'. With gene editing, we'll be able to do 'intelligence genes of smart person, appearance genes of you' and that may be popular).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link