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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25962 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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Until 20 years ago Europe didn't have a race problem, nor anywhere in Asia; yet hereditarianism has never ever been popular in the history of human thought.

Does he realize how the populations have changed in that time? 20 years ago Europe had twice the population of Africa, now the opposite is true. Of course those people are going to go where the money is.

This is obviously bonkers, and East Asian countries (South Korea in particular) are wasting a good third of their GDP in abusing their kids with cram school homework in the false belief that they'll grow more intelligent. A random Chinese will tell you very happily, especially if he has experience abroad, that Africans are congenitally dumber than Chinese are. But he will protest vehemently if you suggest that his kid isn't gonna grow any brighter by doing 5 hours of homework every day.

This seems like a gross misreading of how education works in East Asia. It's not supposed to make you smarter, it's supposed to (a) memorize a whole ton of useful facts and (b) prove that you're smarter than the other kids because you got a top score on the super difficult exam. They don't really have a general reasoning test like the SAT, their test is this: https://asiasociety.org/korea/south-koreas-life-defining-exam which expects you to know and remember all of the academic subjects.

I think you mean 60 years ago.

Double might be an exaggeration. But it really did flip in just the last 20 (edit- by 20 I mean since 2000) years: https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/910dxd/oc_un_world_population_prospects_2017_revision/

Oh that's Sub-Saharan Africa, if you include the whole of Africa then it's about 60 years: Africa was 284M to Europe's 605M back in 1960, today it's 1393 to 765 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continents_and_continental_subregions_by_population

This doesn't really affect your thesis though.

True. I think it's valid to just focus on Sub-Saharan Africa though, since that really is a different culture and geography from MENA.

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