hbd
Regarding @WhiningCoil and why I didn't mod him: first, sometimes a mod doesn't want to mod a particular comment for any number of reasons. It might be because they have a history with that user and are afraid they might be too biased. It might be because they are uncertain how "bad" it is and whether it merits modding (and honestly, they want some other mod to make the call). It might be because it's ambiguous enough we actually need to have a discussion in the mod channel about it. It might be because they just don't feel like taking the effort to write a justification statement for the banning, which especially in borderline cases, where the user is popular, and/or when we expect pushback, needs to be written with some effort to explain our reasoning, rather than just "Bad post, 3-day ban." Regardless of the actual length of the mod message, they do require more effort and thought than a regular post, because I assure you, we all take the responsibility seriously, we don't just react on impulse and ban people when they sufficiently annoy us.
In this case it was a little of all of those. I thought @WhiningCoil's comment was bad, but... eh, assuming you take his story at face value (which generally one should not, you might have noticed how very, very "on the nose" most of his stories are, with anecdotes stocked with horrible NPC caricatures from Central Casting), yes, he was very clearly making an intentional, racialized comment, but he was also (allegedly) describing a real situation. I expected a modding would result in people complaining that we're trying to forbid Noticing (tm). I didn't want to make the call because I am well aware of his animosity and I felt like a mod warning would be better from someone else he can't scream is persecuting him (and whose mod message he would actually read). I knew modding him would require me writing a detailed response justifying it (the sort that @naraburns is much better at), for the benefit of other posters, if not WC. And also, ironically, I like WC (as a poster, though not so much as a person) and he writes quite a few AAQCs. I would prefer he just tone it down rather than getting banned or rage-quitting, but unfortunately his cumulative record is bad enough that he's getting close to a permaban, and I just didn't want to add another stone to that pile, even if he deserves it.
As for the stated principles of the Motte: those are principals. They are aspirational. Do we always achieve those lofty goals? I am certainly not going to say every thread here is high quality discussion full of smart people saying intelligent things. We definitely do not see everyone acting with "charity and kindness." Still, I do think this place is not quite like anywhere else. There are reddit communities that are still good (for some value of "good") but only if the discussion stays away from certain topics. There are places where people can talk about "forbidden" topics (HBD, Holocaust denial, trans-critical views, etc.) but those places are full of people who outright hate the people they are talking about, and no matter how lofty and intellectual they try to be, the seething hate is always evident (and they are not much better than reddit about dealing with contrary opinions).
So is the Motte "converging" on an accepted range of opinions? Maybe, kind of, but we still have some leftists here, there is anything but a unanimous consensus on HBD and trans people and Jews, and the current events topics, the AI topics, the history topics, do often have genuinely high quality and interesting discussions from knowledgeable people with very different perspectives. We get accused of various things from being a "right-wing" site to being a den of seven zillion witches, but I think our principles are still intact if imperfectly enforced. I see the Motte kind of like America: it's never really lived up to its ideals nor fulfilled its promises, the "community" and sense of shared goals is often a polite fiction, and we flounder and sometimes fail, but damned if it doesn't still beat the alternatives.
HereAndGone
14hr ago
At the same time, "someone on Twitter said" doesn't tell us much. What 'someone'? Right wing someone, left wing someone, progressive Marxist someone, Aryan supremacy someone? There's a lot of ground that "someone" covers and we don't know if the tweet, taken out of context, is supportive (I'm a liberal, told ya that reality has a liberal bias), is grudgingly supportive (I'm a tankie, liberals get the bullet too, but this once they were right), is supportive from the other side (I'm conservative, this is where we can agree with liberals), is condemnatory (I believe in the superiority of the white race as proven by HBD and the stupid liberals are trying to tar us as spreading misinformation, this is what we have to fight against) or what.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
daguerrean
1d ago
I thought we were forced to split from SSC so Scott's name was not sullied by association with us due to our most popular topic of discussion at the time, HBD. When TheMotte was formed HBD was kind of our meat and potatoes.
aardvark2
1d ago
You're requiring undue burden of proof. Like some creationists say "show me abiogenesis ab novo". Causal genes for IQ are not established -- currently, GWAS operates with tag SNPs which are just proxies to causal variants near them, but it different populations tag SNP might proxy different variants so there is no easy way to transfer polygenic scores to other population. Actually, Davide Piffer tried that, (and his analysis shows Africans dumber -- check his Substack) -- and got responses "never do that"
At least, not without larger effect sizes and better mathematical techniques.
So are pro-HBD folks say "we don't need larger sample sizes, we already know the truth" or are anti-HBD folks say "we don't need larger sample sizes, we already know the truth"?
Nutrition, parasite load, education infrastructure, epigenetics. Virtually nobody denies these have large effect, but... These are largely downstream of low genetic IQ itself. The other thing that could produce it is bad government. Given that there are many African countries and they were parts of different alliances, it's extremely unlikely that each has uniquely backward government like North Korea has.
Every human born in the last two hundred years lives a live completely unlike the lives we lived in the last five thousand.
I'd disagree about details, but let's assume it's true. You raise actually a valid point that some genes beneficial in ancient environment might be bad now (i.e. improved food digestion then and causing obesity now, ditto protection against infection vs allergy ). But it looks like most of in-population variation is just slightly broken gene variants of ideal brain devised by evolution for current moment.
But geniuses are still geniuses and dumbs still dumbs.
Because: we know that wolves are smarter than dogs.
think that if you were posting this from pro-HBD pespective, someone could write: A Racist Poster Compares Africans To Wolves By Implication.
This theory is unfalsifiable, of course, so I won't ask you to falsify it...
I think it's possible somehow to separate ability for sitting still the longest from intelligence. Btw, many backward cultures had weird rituals, which might have something like sitting still on anthill for certain amount of hime and our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't move for 16 hours per day.
You could devise a separate "sitting long" test which would require something less intellectual. Well... Make them sit and use drum. See, no problemo here.
if we rounded up people at random, gave them IQ tests, dropped them off somewhere remote,
It would make sense to compare teams made of people with similar IQ than than loners.
sohois
1d ago
I wouldn't say the above argument relies on HBD; integration, decentralization, and excessive welfare would still be problems even with high quality immigrants. Observe the furore in many countries over high levels of indian immigration, despite a high average IQ.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
The ideal immigrant comes here not because his home country is a shithole, or because life here is easy and you get paid for showing up, or because his co-ethnics invited him to join their enclave, but because he wants to be German.
But of course, they all already want to be German. They obviously desire your material wealth and geopolitical power, and while they don't want to adopt your pro-social habits per se, they certainly enjoy the more immaterial fruits of your labor: your clean streets, your trusting and friendly people, your effective governance. They openly desire your women's gracile features and quietly envy your men's tall stature.
However, if HBD is to be believed, they can never be Germans, nor can their descendants be Germans; at least, not any recognizable descendants. For the foreseeable future, the only way that they may truly secure the prosperity they desire at scale is to intermarry with your people en masse and encourage their half-breed offspring to do the same. In doing this, they must internally accept the intrinsic inferiority of their type and witness the subsumption of their own clan and lineage into a wholly alien and unrecognizable gestalt.
... to be clear, I derive no pleasure from these words; I am one of the aforementioned half-breeds myself. I've been wanting to do a big top-level post detailing my outlook on these matters for a while, and writing this comment has given me the drive to actually write out the whole thing, so be on the lookout for that, i guess.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
To do so is a blatantly dehumanising use of language that I believe could easily prime those who engage in it to see such a group as less than human, and therefore to be dealt with in the manner you would deal with non-human pests.
You might have had a point sometime before the year 2010. But since that time we've seen this principal stretched to the point of excluding all views outside the progressive standard, and not only that, typically applied selectively. It's a slippery slope with no Schelling Fence, as the rationalists put it. So the entire principle must be discarded. Hitler wasn't the first to compare various people to non-human animals in a derogatory way, he won't be the last, and that wasn't the main problem with him. Sure, if someone's out there saying "black people are vermin", I can reasonably conclude they're scumbags, but trying to suppress that is not a good idea. And if I start building fences around that such that anything even close is also verboten, I'm likely just trying to create ideological uniformity.
To be clear, I'm not accusing him of personally wanting to genocide or start a race war against blacks or anything, nor is this about being squeamish and finding the language offensive. But I think when you normalise referring to groups in such blatantly dehumanising and contemptuous terms, there is a clear risk of it contributing to a culture that views violence against them as legitimate.
This principle, on the other hand, was never any good, and is even more obviously applied selectively. This is just "don't express your bad ideas because you might convince other people of them".
There is nothing about acknowledging HBD or even arguing for explicitly racist policy that requires you to engage in this sort of thing, and the only thing it accomplishes is to potentially egg on the next mass shooter
This principle ("stochastic terrorism") was not only not any good, it was always in bad faith (suppression of bad ideas is such an old idea I don't know about that one). Note that some Trumpists have picked it up (sometimes ironically, probably sometimes seriously) to blame the assassination attempts on Trump on their opponent's rhetoric. It's less a slippery slope than a vertical drop.
Spez1alEd
2d ago
It seems obvious to me that even assuming WhiningCoil's claim is "true," in the sense that young black men commit more crime, and this is inherent to their biology, and we have countless studies to prove it, it is still perfectly valid to strongly object to describing them as an invasive species. To do so is a blatantly dehumanising use of language that I believe could easily prime those who engage in it to see such a group as less than human, and therefore to be dealt with in the manner you would deal with non-human pests. This isn't complicated, it would be clear to everyone if he were describing Jews in a manner that compared them to vermin. So it is with blacks or any other ethnic group.
To be clear, I'm not accusing him of personally wanting to genocide or start a race war against blacks or anything, nor is this about being squeamish and finding the language offensive. But I think when you normalise referring to groups in such blatantly dehumanising and contemptuous terms, there is a clear risk of it contributing to a culture that views violence against them as legitimate.
There is nothing about acknowledging HBD or even arguing for explicitly racist policy that requires you to engage in this sort of thing, and the only thing it accomplishes is to potentially egg on the next mass shooter and to turn the public against you because whatever points you may or may not have, they can clearly see that your position is rooted in seething hatred and malice.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
That's sort of exactly my criticism of race and racism, it just doesn't serve the purpose. We should either talk about discrimination on the individual level, or talk about stereotypes on the group level (and not limit it to poor pattern-matching, open it up to more than just genetic ancestry - let's talk culture and more, directly). Racism is a bad word because it can be applied to either case! Race by itself means genetic ancestry, and quite obviously genetic ancestry is not the biggest thing that matters when talking group-wide trends, fair or unfair alike (plus as I pointed out the ancestry gets fuzzy edges way too easily in modern life, especially melting pot countries like the US). I'm not even trying to start a HBD debate or anything. I agree on the trivially true bit and maybe even a bit more FWIW. But if you think pre-industrial humans believed in HBD or something like it, you'd be wrong on at least two levels.
clo
2d ago
Not again, let's not have the HBD discussion for the billionth time again, here's the cliffs notes:
HBD is trivially true, what decisions, policies, actions are taken as a result of that are up to you, but you need to be aware that they exist because sooner or later you will run into physical reality. You can continue to run from it, you can plan around it, you can even make giant state sponsored psyops to make sure that the hoi polloi don't notice and to prevent them from slaughtering each other. Value judgements about what heritable traits are preferable are again, up to you. Maybe evolution will decide intelligence is the Great Filter and the morons will inherit the earth, what the fuck ever.
Racism depends on how you define it, I don't like Swedish food and I dislike the French but I'd struggle with anyone calling it racism, especially since the definition of what racism is has expanded vastly over the last decade to include the default state of literally every Southeast Asian who has to live around other ethnicities
I was consistently skeptical that China can win this on HBD merits alone, after all the US also has plenty of talented people (very many of them Chinese, but also diverse global and domestic talent), in Nvidia and elsewhere, plus it has a giant and growing edge in compute.
Fair enough, I agree on that. I didn't think you were saying that talent conquers all in this but one can kind of see it reading between the lines. How else could they achieve this result if their talent wasn't superior? Or if not talent, then the juice in an organization that allows good results at speed.
And it seems like export controls are diminishing, per latest news on H20s. But maybe Trump will do another backflip, who can say.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
But Grok 4 just crushes with sheer size I think.
The fact that Grok is at all comparable (or indeed inferior) to Kimi on any metric, even the most obscure one, speaks to the deep cultural advantage of Moonshot. Grok 4's training compute is estimated to be 6.4e26 FLOPs; Kimi, like R1, is likely ≈4.0e24, fully 100 times less. They probably spent on scaling experiments for Grok 3/4 more than Moonshot has spent over their lifetime on everything. It's not really a fair competition, I admit Grok is a stronger model.
It was designed for Musk's vision of AI modelling and understanding the physical universe, that's what it's for and it does excellently there.
I think it wasn't designed with any specific focus in mind, it's an all around next-generation base+RL model.
I think the arc of history still bends towards Nvidia, the biggest company in the world and by some distance. I think like you I was leaning more towards the 'talent conquers all' ethos
You distort my argument. I was consistently skeptical that China can win this on HBD merits alone, after all the US also has plenty of talented people (very many of them Chinese, but also diverse global and domestic talent), in Nvidia and elsewhere, plus it has a giant and growing edge in compute. My thesis is that the gap in applied AI possibly won't be so profound as to allow some Pivotal Action To Secure Durable Strategic Advantage, that the hawks in DC and Dario Amodei fantasize about as they rail for more export controls. Nvidia will remain dominant, so will Western AI labs.
But so far China is doing better than I anticipated, both technically and ethically.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
6d ago
He's the kind of guy who spent his life regurgitating official stats without a hint of critical thinking, because that's what a good student / smart person does, right? But when he gets pushed back, he shows the black heart of a concentration camp guard, just, you know, impotent and sad.
Like a year and a half ago, he got into it with Steve Sailer on HBD. Sailer was polite, but the pile-ons were like watching a herd of lions toy with a sickly gazelle. And Will just did not seem to have the slightest idea how to actually mount an argument when he had to think for himself instead of just repeating the NYT or government stats and he quickly devolved into Downfall, Hitler-In-The-Bunker tier scitzo-ranting about how everyone who disagreed with him were "vermin" who needed to be "expunged", mixed with plaintive cries begging to know why no one else in his tribe was helping him. Why did he argue against the hordes of darkness alone?
And the hordes just spammed him with lines like "Because they know how this ends" and "NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE YOU, WILL".
He's just kind of the biggest, most easily riled dork on the internet, and he can't help himself but enagage every time.
"Undue" relative to what? Again, I'm not arguing that intelligence isn't mediated by genetics, I'm just arguing that we laack sufficient evidence about specifically race-based genetics. And as per your other comment, while larger sample sized would be nice the problem remain the potential for confounders. At the root of the problem is the fact that races are essentialy pre-confounded; we know for a fact that people of different races lead different lifestyles of consistent but largely non-genetic reasons; any of those things will interfere with any attempt to say a particular trait is caused by genetics. Hell, take skin tone for example. We know unambiguously that genes mediate skin tone, but we also know for a fact that any attempt to survey ethnicities by skin tone and attempt to precisely predict the genetic effect would be confounded by the effect of distribution over latitude and likelyhood to tan.
If you actually believe this, you should be more skeptical of hbd, not less. if there's one perfect brain, and iq is just about how close you are to it, the only selection pressures that would matter would be demerits for isolated populations with tight social structures that allow people with genetic defects to survive and breed. That looks like the exact opposite of the smart-jews HBD hypothesis.
I'm not on the motte because I'm interested in being politically correct.
That we should be testing groups is well taken, but the "similar iq" part i disagree with. Even most nuclear families have significant IQ variation. In particular, I think that when resources (food, parental investment, status) are scarce, groups end up adopting tactics that concentrate iq gains in a few individuals (like by feeding the chief's firstborn son better food and working hard to educate him) while the rest are allowed to be dumber. Also, the "smartest" genes are probably relative to body dimensions... Maybe a gene that causes you to grow more neurons on average is best when combined with genes that predispose you to have a big skull, but actually gives you iq reducing mental illness if poor nutrition or being born female gives you a small head.
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