hbd
What Ezra did was the equivalent of walking onto a debate stage and try to lecture an astronomer that the Earth is flat. Maybe he’ll end up appeasing everyone in his political circle who’s got blinders onto the world. To everyone else, he looked like a moron; because he was one.
I wasn't making a moral defense of Klein, I think his behavior speaks for itself. But I think you're underselling just how many people have these same beliefs. Most people don't care and/or instinctively side with Klein (or know they should if they know what's good for them).
In this environment, this behavior can work or fill an important niche. Who is more likely to get a say in polite circles? Some Vox writer posting about an exciting study on some teaching intervention that showed IQ improvements or a more Murrayist take?
Ironically, his conclusions are also very much in line with policy works like Ezra in the first place. It goes to show Ezra has likely never read a word of anything Murray ever wrote.
I don't think you give Klein enough credit. He is a higher class of commentator than Seder. He reads. By his own account he has read and reviewed Murray, and at least knows Murray is for UBI:
The other thing you brought up his UBI work. The reason I bring this up is that, the reason Charles Murray’s work is problematic, is that he uses these arguments about IQ — and a lot of other arguments he makes about other things — to push these points into the public debate, where he is very, very, very influential. He’s not by any means a silenced actor in Washington. He gives Congressional testimony. He won the Bradley Prize in 2016 and got a $250,000 check for it. His book on UBI, it is completely of a piece with this. I reviewed that book when it came out. It’s an interesting book, people should read it, but it is a way of cutting social spending. According to Murray’s own numbers, he says it would cut social spending by a trillion dollars in 2020. To give you a sense of scale, Obamacare costs two trillion dollars over 10 years.
This is another book in a different way that is a huge argument for cutting social spending, which in part he justifies by saying, we are trying to redress racial inequality based on an idea that it is a product of American history, when in fact it is some combination of innate and environmental, but at any rate, it is not something we’re going to be able to change, and so we should stop trying, or at least stop trying in the way we have been.
Because Klein is cleverer than Seder he can see that Murray is offering a poisoned chalice. Vox is about enhancing the arguments of left-wingers so they can advance their agenda. Focusing on the short-term gain of having Republicans agree with you on one program when it undercuts the central pillars of that agenda would be deeply unwise. Social constructionism is far more useful to Klein than Murray's tactical (in his mind) retreat. Setting up a test that could obviate the need for any left-wing policy by attacking the basic assumptions is also incredibly unwise.
Klein doesn't want to cut social spending. Klein doesn't believe that such spending cannot solve persistent problems or that the government should accept that it can at best ameliorate some human capital gaps. Why would he want to? The alternate thesis is what allows his side to accrue power and, hopefully, fix problems. What's Vox's reason for being if the answer is that there's no clever move to be made, let's just stop people starving?
Harris understandably had no patience for engaging in the discussion given how the conversation started, but Klein basically states that not moving towards a more socialist and redistributive position when citing these facts is itself suspect:
This is something you brought up earlier when you brought up that quote from Murray about luck, and I think it’s an important conversation. I think that if you follow Murrayism on this, if you were doing it without the political commitments he brings to it, it actually takes you to a very radical and interesting place.
If you say that our IQ is genetic and environmental, but at any rate, it’s not our fault, because we don’t choose either one of those, and there’s not much we can do about it. Not just our IQ, but something you’ve said is that, you know, a lot of traits come down like this — the big five personality traits, determination. Look, you can connect genetic inheritance to divorce. I think it’s a .2 or .4 correlation. So, if you begin to believe that, actually you begin to ask the question of, should, do we deserve what we have? Should society be vastly more redistributed than it actually is? Should we be much less within this construct that what we’re getting, we’re getting because of hard work and determination and intelligence and the application of our talents? In fact, we need to move to something that is, I’m not literally advocating this, but more in the range of full socialism.
What I think is so interesting about the way he takes this debate — and I recognize this is not somewhere you took the debate, but I do think this is a useful thing to talk about — is that if you really did believe things immutable, if you really did believe that this was our inheritance both environmental and genetic and we can’t do much about it, then I think the implications of that are radical, and the implications aren’t that you take away help from people. It’s that you say pretty much what all of us has is primarily illegitimate. We didn’t do anything to earn it. I just happened to be born with the collection of talents that got me where I am. And as such, what we should spread around in society is much more vast.
Funnily enough, I don’t ever see people take that attitude on this. Again, the history of these ideas in America is they tend to be used to justify the status quo, not radically more generous versions of the status quo, but I do think that’s interesting, and I don’t understand why people don’t take that leap. I think that the implication of this is, it’s luck, and if you want to believe that — and, again, I don’t believe they’re immutable, I don’t think that’s what the evidence shows — but if you do believe they’re luck, I don’t think it takes you where he went in your conversation.
Believing in HBD is itself bad, but using it to cut state spending...beyond the pale.
I don’t know what anyone has to consult Murray over.
Murray seems to be the Bart Ehrman of intelligence research. Attacked because he's prominent, but there is also an incentive to make it a lot more about him than may be necessary, since it gives a certain view a convenient avatar to attack and to thus marginalize amongst your audience by proxy.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3d ago
Many of the controversial positions that are now considered inside the Overton window of The Motte, such as HBD and the disaster of the sexual revolution, were first popularized through his blog.
I think you are giving him too much credit. I'd consider Vox Day more influential than Jim, and neither of them are really well-known outside the highly politicized Very Online. I am skeptical that Jim was the first to "popularize" HBD or criticism of the sexual revolution.
The Dreaded Jim is pretty much the most right-wing blogger on the internet. Many of the controversial positions that are now considered inside the Overton window of The Motte, such as HBD and the disaster of the sexual revolution, were first popularized through his blog.
He is legendary for his bluntness, explaining in ten words what others do in ten thousand, sort of like an anti-Moldbug. Readers who are not scared off get redpilled twice as fast as by any other source.
Jim has been doing this for a very long time; the original blog dates back to 2005, the original website to 2002 1998, and you can find mentions of his name on Usenet archives going back to the 90's.
His actual pseudonym is James A. Donald, or Jim for short, but Scott called him The Dreaded Jim once, and it stuck.
Excellent response. We should be friends.
And yes, I endorse all of the above. Mainly I'm not saying more because later in the series (especially in books three and four) I take all this in what would seem to current readers an extraordinarily-surprising direction and I don't want to tip my hand yet.
Men can be more than brutes, and women can be more than whores. Not in Tidus! But we do not live in Tidus. And book two is set in a different world at any rate.
I'm working on (for a very loose definition of "working") a post detailing my thoughts on the psychosocial consequences of HBD on the members of genetically disadvantaged races
Looking forward to it. I touch on this here and there in this book. Different is generally worse. And that holds true even when it's better!
Secondly, we've seen that 'different' can be a good thing when it comes to mates. As a man myself I happen to feel greatly appreciative of certain specific feminine differences! But even among potential mates, 'different' is still often a bad thing.
Consider the position of an organism looking for a partner. First it encounters a potential mate which is different in terms of being noticeably inferior. This is obviously a bad deal, especially for females, who have sharply-limited reproductive potential. Mating with an inferior organism will produce inferior offspring — quite contrary to the entire point of the reproductive exercise! But then it encounters a potential mate which is different in terms of being noticeably superior. Great, right?
Alas, no. At least, not usually.
This new potential mate isn't interested in coupling with our prospective organism. Why would it be? We just saw that this wouldn't make sense. So instead, the superior organism will go on to find another superior organism, leaving ours alone and very probably heartbroken. Ours may, in time, find something at its own level — but if there are superior ones reproducing out there, their offspring are likely to supplant and thus extinguish those of our organism.
From chapter one.
Sloot
3d ago
And what we're seeing is instead that it's all more complicated than we thought it was, and definitely isn't traceable to US Census category levels of resolution.
Who’s this “we”?
It’s not that complicated at all and broad racial categories work well, especially for the topic of black American (lack of) average achievement. Despite decades of goodthinkers muddying the waters, making excuses, and performing interventions on behalf of black Americans, the standardized test score gap remains substantial between black and white Americans, and even moreso between black and Asian Americans.
Furthermore, "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials," and the pattern is even more drastic between blacks and Asians. A similar phenomenon holds for homicide rates. This is peskily consistent with the HBD hypothesis and peskily inconsistent with the blank slatism.
gorge
3d ago
And what we're seeing is instead that it's all more complicated than we thought it was, and definitely isn't traceable to US Census category levels of resolution.
Maybe more complicated than you thought it was, but Sailer and the HBDers have talking about these nuances and for a long time. IIRC correctly, it was from the Sailersphere that I learned about interesting racial differences even among the broad racial categories, such as the height advantage and athletic prowess of the peoples of the Dinaric Alps. Furthermore, it was actually sprinting and marathoning that Sailer used as the clearest example of racial differences. Sailer has always said nurture matters as well as nature for most things. But sprinting has far less room for nurture playing a role than does a high-skill and complex game like basketball. I also learned about the differences between East Africans and West Africans and Khosis, and then even among West African tribes, etc. There is a running joke that if a man knows what an Igbo is, he is probably a super racist.
I think you and the OP are making pretty different claims. Maybe the OP, in their TLDR uses dialectic terms, but the problem is you can make a just so dialectical story about anything as they do. If you see the HBDers as wrong so the Yarvinites aren't on the synthesis edge but instead the regressive edge. If you see HBD as right then they're a synthesis of the older pure racism with modern science. This structure can't actually do anything but affirm your priors. You could take this structure and decide that women really are physically the equals of men. And the application to Gaza? What is that even supposed to mean? What is the Thesis and Antithesis of Gaza? It a quagmire, a lose lose situation, not some kind of dialectical question.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
3d ago
I don't think she's commenting on some averaged measure of QoL, or at least it's not the true substrate of her objection.
Throughout this post and the last, you've described the increased evolutionary pressure males have gone through to secure mates, in the process honing their intellects, physical skills, and cooperative acumen. Meanwhile, the females' dependence on the males has given them little incentive to develop their physical or mental constitutions, and what pressures they are subjected to is directed towards making them even more pathetic (to use your term) in a zero-sum struggle for male providence. From the picture you're painting, it's not hard to conclude that the masculine condition is fundamentally nobler, closer to the Imago Dei, than the feminine condition. Like with how you describe women's evolutionarily adaptive tendency to embrace their conquerors, the thought of such perfidy being engrained into the female psyche naturally lowers one's perception of them as a group and might justifiably invoke self-loathing of the type exhibited above.
Actually, this reminds me of something. I'm working on (for a very loose definition of "working") a post detailing my thoughts on the psychosocial consequences of HBD on the members of genetically disadvantaged races (spoiler: pretty devastating), and why the usual refrain of "you're [one of the good ones], why do you care?" is utterly ignorant. Your use of the terms "genetically inferior/superior" suggests that your thoughts on this matter might be more similar to mine than the median Mottizen, so I think you're better primed than most to empathize with HereAndGone's lament.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
You posted a wall of text that amounted to "Suck it, HBDers, your forbears were wrong in the past and consequently you're wrong now". You didn't indicate which quotes were load-bearing and which weren't, so it seems to me they're all fair game. Anyway, I can't find any of the quotes except in secondary sources written by their opponents much later.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
There was a time not long ago when the USA was expected to not just win the Olympic tournament, but would have been favored against a combined rest of world team. Now the USA would be iffy against Yugoslavia, and in the last Olympics relied on a starting C who, really, shouldn't be on the USA basketball team.
There's layers of irony. Sailer type HBDers have long offered the NBA as the thin wedge to argue that we accept ethnic differences in some fields, and "evolution doesn't stop at the neck," so we should be willing to accept the reality of differences elsewhere. And what we're seeing is instead that it's all more complicated than we thought it was, and definitely isn't traceable to US Census category levels of resolution.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
With and Against Yarvin on Cults, Racism, Gaza, and the Danger of Being Wrong
TLDR: Cults and related extremist groups arise when the Commanding Heights of culture and intellect are wildly and obviously wrong about something, opening space for less respectable and reputable groups to be obviously correct. In a healthy example, the Antithesis is quickly synthesized into the mainstream; in an unhealthy example the Thesis stands rigid and refuses to budge, and a as a result the antithesis grows in power and control. Seeing that the Antithesis is correct about one thing, people buy into the whole program, and pretty soon: there’s the Flavor-Aid.
My wife and I have been on a big kick of cults lately. She’s been watching a done of documentaries on cults, running from Heaven’s Gate and Synanon through NXVIM* and Gwen Shamblin. I, meanwhile, have been listening to Daryl Cooper’s extensive podcast on Jim Jones and The People’s Temple. Cooper does a great job of contextualizing Jones within the broader left* and the culture of the time. Cooper gives us the loony fringe left of the time, and how People’s Temple fit into that cultural movement. The insane things the Black Panthers would say, and the credibility they were given. The Weathermen taking over SDS, and actually going out to start a revolution. How insane everyone was, that Angela Davis would endorse People’s Temple, and call Jonestown in some of its last days to talk to Jones and encourage his people to hold the line against capitalism/racism/etc.
But what Cooper also does a great job of is showing the racism that the Panthers and the People’s Temple and their supporters active and passive were all reacting against. He starts the work quoting extensively from Isabella Wilkerson on lynchings in the South, the resulting Great Migration to the North, and the racism faced by blacks in Northern cities like Chicago. The violence in Cicero against a college educated father trying to move his family into a better neighborhood, where he could pay lower rent and have room for the piano they bought for their daughter.** He movingly talks about MLK and Selma, and the violence that lead to the rise of SDS and the Black Panthers.
I never realized how much of People’s Temple’s work was devoted to race issues, and how much of the congregation was black. Which, in light of recent conversations, has me thinking about how People’s Temple and similarly insane groups were enabled by American racism. They were handed a public issue, in which the mainstream was quite obviously morally wrong by its own standards and factually wrong in its claims. This enabled a malignant narcissist like Jim Jones to be correct about one thing, which caused a lot of people to listen to him about other things. I think people don’t appreciate this, on either left or right, because they don’t remember that…
Racists Really Did Believe in Racism
Curtis Yarvin in a recent podcast appearance talked about recent studies published in Nature indicating significant genetic contribution in sub-Saharan African genomes from an unknown hominid species, theorized to have diverged from modern humans before Neanderthals. Yarvin strongly implies, though he does not outright state, that this contribution indicates that sub-Saharan African populations are other than or less than other humans, and then moves on from the point quickly. Yarvin jokes that:
It's strange because it reminds us of our racist Uncle Roy and inevitably reminds us of our racist Uncle Roy who is not a reader of Science magazine. How did he get this information? How did he know? That's the question we have to answer.
This was the outright expression of something I’ve been thinking about for a while. A pretty frequent argument seen in right wing or putatively trad spaces: our ancestors knew these things, their superstitions were suppressed by a movement of the evil or the idiotic who forced us to pretend that things that aren’t true are, that the emperor had clothes, but we who can notice can look at the facts and the science and realize that they were true all along. But this ends up, inevitably, being an act of sane washing of the opinions of racists of the past. The modern HBDer like Yarvin takes a defensible compromise Motte, then declares Uncle Roy’s Bailey to be fully under control!
Much as atheist materialists try to rewrite history by assuming that all examples of religion are really cynical efforts to achieve material benefit, both racists and anti-racists of today sometimes do the same with racism. They soft-pedal the racist beliefs of American whites circa 1776-last week. HBDers sanewash their predecessors, talking about bell curves and averages and standard deviations. Wokes paint the racists of the past as purely evil, bent only on preserving their own selfish social and economic privileges through a devious and cynical set of schemes to keep the obviously equal (or brilliant) black man down. A certain breed of online dissident rightist will even buy into the woke framing, and try to sell racial segregation as a neutral social technology, that reducing diversity is necessary to conjure up social trust or something.
When the reality was, racists of the past were genuinely racist, they really did believe that the blacks and Jews etc. were inferior. And not just inferior on average within overlapping bell curves, or in specific metrics, or as a result of cultural conditioning. White racists often believed that every black was inferior in every way to essentially every white American. Consider, for a moment, the dialogue on sports pre-Jackie Robinson. The color line in sports is generally presented today as something done specifically to be cruel, to keep superior black athletes**** from getting their proper respect, to keep social lines intact. For the most part, if you ask those who created and upheld these lines, they genuinely thought that blacks couldn’t compete. The goal wasn’t to keep blacks from beating whites, it was to give blacks a League of their Own where they could compete without getting blown out by superior whites.
Before Jack Johnson, the assumption was that the greatest fighter in the world must be a white man. After all, the white man had outfought every other race, had the world in subjugation in 1900, how could it be otherwise than that he would win in the ring? Among the first great African American sportsmen, Johnson was the first black heavyweight champion of the world. He is celebrated for managing to break the color barrier, after pursuing the white champion across countries and borders trying to force him to fight, but few remember that beforehand most white experts doubted he could do it at all. Harper’s Weekly in 1910 argued that “The superiority of the brain of the white man … is undisputed by all authorities… [A] white man fighting with a negro … ought not to be defeated if the contest be prolonged.” The same logic lead the Washington Post to argue about a hypothetical meeting between black champion Jack Johnson and white hope Jeffries “If Jeffries ever meets Johnson and is in his old trim, experts believe that ‘Texas Jack’ will not last more than ten rounds.” Jeffries and Johnson did meet, after years of intrepid effort by Johnson to bring him to the ring, and Johnson won despite a ruleset that allowed for up to forty rounds to be fought. The Grey Lady must have been worried sick after, the editors at the New York Times had openly speculated before the fight that "If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors.” The editors had set the stakes, and Johnson had delivered. Uncle Roys across the country wept, gnashed their teeth, and searched for a Great White Hope (the origin of the phrase) who would set things right by winning the heavyweight belt. They would mostly be disappointed until the millennium, outside of Sylvester Stallone movies.
Baseball, America’s pastime, was next. I’ve written before about how important Jackie Robinson was as a civil rights figure. Today he is mostly remembered as a social hero, but much more than that he was a baseball player, a true talent hall of famer with the WAR and the .400 OBP to show for it. He was great and his greatness proved the doubters wrong. Fred Lieb felt that Black ballplayers lacked the stamina to hold up to a 154 game schedule, or the refinement to handle the professional game at the highest level. Grantland Rice said the negro couldn’t handle the mental aspect of Major League ball, while Hugh Fullerton and Cap Anson often stated they lacked the discipline to stand the strain of the big leagues. Joe Williams in the New York World Telegram argued bluntly that: “Black players have been kept out of big league ball because they are, as a race, very poor ball players[,]” and would go on to say that "The demands of the Negro often bulk larger than his capabilities.” In the Sporting News J. G. Taylor Spink said of Jackie Robinson when he was in the Dodgers minor league system that “at 26… were he white and a polite college player, [he] would be eligible for a trial with one of the Brooklyn B farm organizations[,]” while Dan Daniel said “[Robinson] wasn’t of International [minor] League caliber.” Jackie Robinson would go on to put up a purely statistical Hall of Fame career and finally lead the Dodgers to the World Series. Robinson’s performance disproved
Despite the rise of the black athlete in mid century America, one spot where whites held out until recently was at quarterback in football. Bear Bryant, arguably the greatest college coach of all time, said that “The quarterback has to be a leader, and I don’t think a colored boy can do the things we need done at quarterback;” while Fran Curci of Kentucky told the NYT that “They’re great runners, but when it comes to reading defenses and passing, I don’t think the coloreds can handle it; and an anonymous NFL coach as late as 1978 felt comfortable telling Sports Illustrated that “The quarterback position requires more thinking than running, and that’s why you don’t see many blacks there. They’re not thinkers.” There wouldn’t be any black QBs in the pro game until the 80s, and they would remain a curiosity until the 2010s. Only in recent years have we seen black QBs break out of the running QB mold (and arguably seen teams overrate black QBs perceived as Athletic over white QBs perceived as statuesque pocket passers).
I’m sticking with sports because they’re easy, and the results are statistically obvious on the field. I hope I won’t be accused of consensus building when I say that we could dig up innumerable Uncle Roys saying Thurgood Marshall could never make it as a lawyer or judge, that there would never be a great black novelist or musician, that no black man would ever reach the rank of general in the US Army, or perform heart surgery. But that would be exhausting and boring. The sporting examples are enough to prove the point: our racist Uncle Roys, or perhaps Uncle Roy’s racist great uncle Roger, weren’t of the opinion that there were mostly-overlapping-bell-curves with different averages, they were of the opinion that blacks couldn’t compete with whites in any field.
Turn again to the same topic with regards to women. I’ve often seen it said on here that until the rise of Feminism and then of TRANS, everyone intuitively and obviously knew that women were about 35-40% weaker than men, that they would never come within 20% of men’s performance in sporting events. This is, again, sane washing history. When Bobbi Gibb tried to run the Boston Marathon in 1966 (when, for context, my father was in college), race director Will Cloney rejected her on the grounds that women were “physiologically incapable” of running 26 miles. Other observers theorized that her uterus might fall clean out. This year, the difference between the men’s and women’s winners in Boston was less than fifteen minutes in a total time of just over two hours. This is not what Uncle Roy predicted, and to pretend that fifteen minutes is closer to “her uterus falls out” than it is to equality strikes me as odd.***** The famed tennis Battle of the Sexes is often derided today, don’t you know that he was out of shape and old, that Serena and Venus in their primes couldn’t take some minor league nobody in tennis, etc. What this ignores is that the Uncle Roys of the world really believed that Billy Jean King didn’t stand a chance, that any professional male would slaughter her. The result was genuinely shocking to a great many people at the time.
This brings us back to the man himself, Curtis Yarvin. When imagining a coup-complete solution to the problems of the modern United States, Moldbug pictured the key tool to destroy his nemesis The Cathedral as an alternative truth telling service he labeled the “Antiversity.”
If you identify this as a case of circular reasoning, you are right. More precisely, it is a case of game theory—even more precisely, a coordination problem. The only way to break this cycle is to create a Schelling point: a credible and precise alternative. A red button. So this is the strategy. What, exactly, is this mysterious device? In the First Step, we do not replace all of USG. We just replace its brain— the University. With a new device we call the Antiversity, which is pretty much what it sounds like it is. Here is a summary: The Antiversity is an independent producer of veracity—a truth service. It rests automatic confidence in no other institution. Its goal is to uncover any truth available to it: both matters of fact and perspective. It needs to always be right and never be wrong. Where multiple coherent perspectives of an issue exist, the Antiversity must provide all—each composed with the highest quality available...The power of a truth service is its reliability. It may remain prudently silent on any point; it must err on none. The thesis of the Procedure is that if we can construct a truth service much more powerful than USG’s noble and revered ministry of information, we will be able to use it to safely and effectively defeat USG. Indeed, I can imagine no other way to solve the problem. Once this device of great veracity, the Antiversity—expressing not only razor-sharp analytical intelligence, not just exhaustive learning, but also great prudence and judgment—is fully armed and operational, it is straightforward to ask it the question: chto dyelat? What is to be done? What is the sequel to the coup d’état? What is Plan B?
His core idea is that the Antiversity would present all facts, including the ones that are inconvenient for the NYT or for Harvard, the Antiversity will be correct in its statements and predictions while The Cathedral will be wrong, and that as people recognize this they will notice what is going on around them and this will bring down The Cathedral and bring in a more sane regime. I’ve always found this a compelling argument, as I find many things Moldbug said. The conflict lies between Yarvin’s prior Moldbug arguments, and his current championing of your racist Uncle Roy, in that Uncle Roy and his arguments lost his credibility by more or less exactly this process. Uncle Roy predicted that Jack Johnson would lose, that Jackie Robinson lacked the discipline to play in the majors, that women couldn’t run 26 miles, that no woman could beat any man in competitive tennis. He was wrong every time, lost his credibility, and was dismissed as a crank, his views ignored or reengineered into imaginary social boundary keeping or capitalist exploitation.
But in the process, a lot of people became extremists or joined cults. The People’s Temple, Synanon, The Weathermen, the Panthers, the Red Army Faction, SDS. Their best recruiting tool was the purported racism of the establishment, this issue on which the establishment was obviously incorrect, being proven incorrect regularly. Cult leaders like Jim Jones used the racism of society as a recruiting tool, as his most powerful recruiting tool. Jim Jones used the obviously incorrect stances of millions of Uncle Roys to convince his followers that they should look for alternate sources of truth, sources like Jim Jones. That they should trust Jim Jones in all things, and even when Uncle Roy points out all the weird shit going on with Jim Jones he lacks credibility because he was wrong so many times, and Uncle Roy isn’t even around to ask what’s in the Flavor Aid.
The cults were the flower of this phenomenon, but the fruit is our modern world, where people genuinely think that men and women are physically equal if women only tried harder, and citing simple statistics and repeatable studies is verboten, for fear of sounding like Uncle Roy. The modern absurdities are born of overreaction to the absurdities of yesteryear. We must be careful not to overstate our cases and produce yet more absurdities, circling a Hegelian drain.
Which brings us to the other great recruiting tool of the 60s-era cults: Vietnam. Vietnam was a botched abortion of a colonial war, born in deceit and confusing esoteric doctrine, carried on in lies and half measures, brought to an embarrassing defeat after extended flailing and extensive murder of innocents. The establishment was always wrong on Vietnam, and always obviously wrong, and it destroyed the credibility of the establishment when Nixon’s conversations with Kissinger made clear that the establishment itself knew that they were wrong. Nixon knew the war was lost when he reached office, and continued it out of a strategy of achieving a “decent interval” before surrender, or occasionally bombed Laos or Camdodia in a half-hearted attempt to turn the tide.
Today’s absurdity is Gaza. A carnival of cruelty, with no obvious exit strategy. Israel has never had a real theory of victory, no one has yet offered a real plan for Gaza going forward, a few Israeli cranks on the right wing will at least attempt to forward real plans for genocide or ethnic cleansing, but mostly everyone still talks about a two-state solution that will obviously never come to be. Israel will not allow any group that could govern Gaza to govern Gaza, will neither absorb Gaza nor let it go, will neither integrate the Palestinians nor murder them in numbers significant enough to achieve population reduction. Gaza is kept in desperate famine, but not exterminated; it is kept miserable but not destroyed. And the vast majority of US politicians stand with Israel, and are more concerned with campus no-no words than with ongoing physical cruelty to no obvious end.
But what the lessons of Uncle Roy and Jim Jones should teach us is that being wrong for a long time in public is dangerous. It can destroy your credibility, it can overthrow regimes, it can lead to a reaction much worse than the problem ever was to begin with. The dynamic of truth-telling as revolutionary act that Yarvin purports to espouse, is most dangerous when the regime chooses to be obviously wrong.
We need solutions in Gaza, however brutal they may be they must be logical. We need to stick to facts, to stick to truth, to stick to principles. To do otherwise creates openings for things that are worse than we can imagine.
Footnotes
*While Cooper spends a lot of time denigrating groups like the Weathermen and the Black Panthers, people who try to deride Cooper as a simple racist clearly haven’t consumed much of his content, where he’ll quote pages of Isabella Wilkerson or James Baldwin at you. That said, I warned my wife before recommending the work to her, the one thing Cooper did that was in poor taste: he should not have tried to do various blaccents when reading primary sources, it sounds ridiculous and embarrassing.
**Places like Cicero would provide some of the inspiration to the play A Raisin in the Sun which I saw performed locally a few months ago. The play was extremely well acted, the plot orients around a similar black family who put a down payment on a house in a white neighborhood, only to be approached by the Clyburne Park Improvement Association with an offer to buy them out of the contract at a higher price than they had paid originally. The conflict over whether to take the money or not results in a moving soliloquy from the male lead, in which he imagines his conversation with the whites who want to keep them out:
MAMA Baby, how you going to feel on the inside? WALTER Fine! … Going to feel fine … a man … MAMA You won’t have nothing left then, Walter Lee. WALTER (Coming to her) I’m going to feel fine, Mama. I’m going to look that son-of-a-bitch in the eyes and say— (He falters)—and say, “All right, Mr. Lindner—(He falters even more)—that’s your neighborhood out there! You got the right to keep it like you want! You got the right to have it like you want! Just write the check and—the house is yours.” And—and I am going to say—(His voice almost breaks) “And you—you people just put the money in my hand and you won’t have to live next to this bunch of stinking niggers! …” (He straightens up and moves away from his mother, walking around the room) And maybe—maybe I’ll just get down on my black knees … (He does so; RUTH and BENNIE and MAMA watch him in frozen horror) “Captain, Mistuh, Bossman— (Groveling and grinning and wringing his hands in profoundly anguished imitation of the slowwitted movie stereotype) A-hee-hee-hee! Oh, yassuh boss! Yasssssuh! Great white—(Voice breaking, he forces himself to go on)—Father, just gi’ ussen de money, fo’ God’s sake, and we’s—we’s ain’t gwine come out deh and dirty up yo’ white folks neighborhood …” (He breaks down completely) And I’ll feel fine! Fine! FINE! (He gets up and goes into the bedroom)
This was a small theater, a black box set up with maybe a hundred people, so I was only a dozen feet from him as he did this. Excellent actor. But, and this actually did make me reflect on white privilege as a concept, I couldn’t help but reimagine the play as a comedy. In the script, they tell the whites to go stuff it and they move in anyway, with the consequences good and bad obvious to the audience. But in my mind, if I put money down on a house, and someone came asking to buy me out for more, I’d do nothing but ask for more money, there’s some price at which I’d absolutely take the money. Obviously if I got a really good deal to start, they’d have to really pay me out, but I’d absolutely sell to them at some price. And I’d be trying to convince them that I didn’t want to sell, and that they really really didn’t want me to live there, to pump up the price.
And this is where it ought to be a comedy, Walter Lee imagines himself getting on his knees before the White Man, degrading himself, calling himself nigger, begging; he imagines this is how he will be able to take more from the white man. When that’s the opposite of what he ought to do to get more money out of the Clyburne Park Improvement Association! When the CPIA shows up, they should be blaring the most obnoxious Negro music they can find in 1959. Walter Lee should be telling them that while he appreciates the offer, he is really looking forward to having the house in Clyburne park so he can have all his friends over for barbecues, and that he just couldn’t accept their number. Meanwhile, Walter Lee ought to be inviting all his blackest friends over to jump in and out of the apartment at random to “talk business” while the CPIA is there, hinting darkly at how the house in Clyburne Park will be perfect for their “business” and how all the customers will be able to find the house easy and park all over the neighborhood. Beneatha and Ruth should dress like whores, hell have the grandmother wander in half dressed and drunk. Beneatha’s African boyfriend Asagai*** should show up in a loin cloth with a spear yelling unintelligibly in gibberish, while Beneatha’s rich respectable colored boyfriend George will bring over a car load of his black fraternity brothers, all drunk on malt liquor, and start a fight with Asagai. In the midst of all this negro ruckus, the respectable suburbanites of the CPIA, terrified of this kind of family moving into their neighborhood, double their offer to Walter Lee, who sighs and accepts it. The CPIA YTs scurry out, and the blacks collectively break character and laugh together at how they hoodwinked the Man.
The fact that this is the obvious way the story should end, says something about my relationship with racial pride as a white person.
***I imagined Asagai in all his appearances as Barack Obama’s dad. Chicago university in 1959 is about when he would have been around. It added spice to the dialogue if you thought about Asagai later marrying a white bitch and leaving town, ditching her with the baby Barack. This isn’t strictly accurate, but Asagai as an archetype is literally Obama pere.
****Black American superiority in athletics is also rapidly being revealed as a myth. The various race scientists proclaiming it are too numerous to discuss here in my fourth footnote to an already overly verbose comment, but Jimmy the Greek has turned out to be wrong in addition to being rude. Black athletic dominance was a fact of life in the late 90s, but it peaked around the early 2000s and has been in decline ever since, across all major American sports (other than Hockey, which never had any black players). When I was a kid, it was basically understood that there would never be another white heavyweight champ outside of Rocky movies, never be a star white halfback in the NFL, never be a dominant white NBA MVP. As with the ascent of the black athlete, the decline started in boxing, moved to baseball, and has since started to show up in football and basketball. Russian/Ukrainian fighters have mostly dominated the heavyweight championship since the fall of the USSR, with the odd Irish traveler or Mexican thrown in. The percentage of black (African American) players in Major League Baseball peaked in the 80s at around 20%, and now sits at 6-7%. The percentage of black NFL players peaked in the early 2000s at 70%, and now sits just over 55%, with notable recent white stars at traditionally black skill positions like RB, WR, and CB popping up literally for the first time in decades. The NBA, of course, remains predominantly American black by numbers, but the rise of slavs like Jokic and Doncic has punctured myths, and the Serbian team took the US olympic team to the brink without a single black player. Racist myths are being punctured, here. Were I Ibram X Kendi, I would be trying to get Cooper Dejean and Christian McCaffrey on a podcast. We desperately want athletic success to be ethnic in nature, genetic in nature, but we’ve gotten it wrong every time. Basketball was once thought to be a great sport for Jews because it offered so many opportunities for trickery and deceit. But, of course, the Jews among HBD believers argue that Uncle Roy was right about the blacks, but wrong about the Jews.
*****Though this may be just be a case of appropriate username. I’m pretty sure my uterus would have fallen out if I had one.
This has led to what is today a democratic system where the president and ministers are superficially interchangeable but decide nothing because they're all controlled by intel services from behind the scenes with pedophile porn blackmail on every statesman.
Well, Trump actually has pedophile porn blackmail on himself, and everyone knows it, but he seems to be getting along pretty well. I think the truth is a bit more mundane than that- there's simply no pressure to do anything effective outside of the inertia of conservatism bureaucracy, so it just drifts that way. Even though those in the bureaucracy might be empowered to make decisions, the question of what decisions to make becomes difficult, so "advance the kingdom of Jesus [or his modern equivalent, LGBTesus]" becomes the default.
The trick about the American state is that they legitimately are both competent and significant enough on the world stage for that competence to be meaningful, unlike every other state except for maybe Russia, China, and I guess France.
mercilessly culls its elite preventing corruption and is thus impervious to being infected itself
The US doesn't need a service to do this, mostly for HBD reasons. The thing the US population (this is an English heritage thing) is easily corrupted by are the promise of 51% attacks, where half the society + 1 person forces their own corruption on the other half minus one. It's "democracy", you see- and the demos is just as corruptible as the kings and nobles of old (which is why people who know they're doing wrong hide behind "but The People make the rules"). BLM is a particularly salient example of this. So is Brexit, for that matter.
As for 'schizo nonsense', this is the Russian political MO and has been since at least Tsar Alexander, if those Historia Civilis videos are at all accurate. He doesn't actually understand this (due to having a particular/modern political bias), but openly absurd and inconsistent bluster and back-channeling and threats of force and just bog standard J. Jonah Jameson-ing is just kind of how these guys work. It's an unstable stability, if that makes any sense.
The obfuscation the Russians employ is that you can't even figure out what their kind of dishonesty actually is. If you can predict the manner of a man's dishonesty (or more properly, his interests), you can plan for and bargain with and manage him. It makes sense, then, that confusing how others would predict the manner in which you will be dishonest today could be a valid negotiating strategy.
It makes sense that Trump, being accustomed to that style of negotiation, would find it easier to work with a person whose entire concept of statecraft is (by some geographical-social necessity) basically just that, in contrast to his own empire's provinces who negotiate in that stereotypically feminine way where everyone pretends they don't have authority over anything (to say nothing of the Chinese, who have 2000 more years of experience in that negotiation strategy).
sodiummuffin
11d ago
As for the “migrant crime” angle, I want to point out that Scotland is not England, and certainly not Rotherham. The “migrant problem” is much less pronounced here.
From the same city:
BBC: Grooming gang convicted of raping women in Dundee
While official sources do not mention ethnicity, commenters online (from before the recent incident) appear to believe these Romanian gang members are ethnically Romani. Other commenters viewing a picture of the Bulgarian couple believe they are also Romani. Personally I am no EthnoGuessr expert and can't identify any of them except that they do seem to be vaguely non-white.
Outside Edinburgh or Glasgow, brown skin is still a curiosity, more likely to prompt a friendly question than suspicion.
I think the low population of non-whites actually makes it less likely to be a coincidence? (Though non-coincidence isn't the same thing as guilt, for example the children could be harassing them over their race if they associate that race with local gangs.) Especially if they and the prior grooming gang arrests in the same city are both indeed Romani, which only make up 0.2% of the Scottish population. Unfortunately I can't find any source on the Romani population in Dundee. The Romani population in all of Scotland is 6,500 and the population of Dundee is 150,000. The "Romani in Dundee" Facebook group has 2,100 members, but it's public and I don't know how many spambot members Facebook groups tend to have.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
13d ago
The distinction starts to get blurry very quickly.
We can reasonably assume that there is a fact of the matter regarding which HBD claims are true. But the reason people take such strong stances on HBD, even in the face of inconclusive or insufficient empirical evidence, is because of their values. It’s hard to cleanly separate questions of value and questions of fact because our values influence what we think about the facts.
ABigGuy4U
28d ago
I think one factor everyone is forgetting is that it didn’t actually cost much to be pro-Israel for the last 20 years. It didn’t cost much to be pro-Palastine either. Go to AIPAC conference once a year “blah blah unbreakable commitment to the continued existence of the state of Israel blah blah” pass Go, collect 2 million dollars in PAC money. Or alternatively, “blah blah illegal apartheid regime, boycotts and sanctions” all the college students clap, your leftist card is now good for another three years even though 80 percent of your votes are solely for the benefit of Raytheon. There had only been minimal violence since the end of the Second Intifada, and it looked like things would only get better in the future.
Now, supporting one or the other carries significant costs, and someone is going to hate you whomever you pick. Each choice is also going to permanently associate you with it’s own set of gory videos showing various unsympathetic behaviors by your guys. Politicians have spent the last two years trying to figure out the new reality and how to best exploit it for votes and campaign contributions. In conclusion, blah blah rational argument, blah blah updating my Bayesian priors blah blah Aella HBD whatever give me updoots.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
28d ago
These Islamic societies were not majority Islamic- Islam degrades HBD capital over the long term by encouraging cousin marriage. As a scientific racist I'd expect you to pay attention to that.
Doesn't pass the sniff test since the great men of the Islamic golden age were, as far as I know, all Muslims. Any hard evidence for this position?
hydroacetylene
29d ago
Early Christian writers talked about treating their women and slaves better than the pagans- and in ancient Rome this was not an all-important value you could expect them to lie about. Anthropologists today note the effects of Christianization in the third world.
Islamic societies were the most advanced in the world for centuries. Look into the Islamic Golden Age. The civilization that built the Alhambra and founded the first universities in the world, institutions which directly inspired the Europeans who founded the oldest centers of higher learning in Europe.
These Islamic societies were not majority Islamic- Islam degrades HBD capital over the long term by encouraging cousin marriage. As a scientific racist I'd expect you to pay attention to that.
Corvos
1mo ago
I think there's some of both. Someone was talking last week about how much environmentalism is an aesthetic: happy, multi-coloured people in harmony with nature and each other, living in beautiful garden cities. And that aesthetic is both positive and negative to some degree. Pro-local neighbourhoods has to mean anti-car, pro-clean-air means anti-smoke and therefore anti-factory, anti-wood-fires, anti-gas-hobs etc.
I think @anti-dan is correct in that often the 'anti-' aesthetic comes first, people dislike chaos and capitalism and want central planning, they dislike 'dirty' industry, they dislike racism and nationalism and parocialism and this plays a big role in their willingness to become Greens and to believe the more extreme takes on that side.
As always, I default to Bertrand Russel's method: any deeply held belief requires at least two of [personal desire, +/- social pressure, and preponderance of empirical evidence]. You will believe something if you really like it and the evidence seems to line up that way (HBD, often), or if you like it and your community agrees even though the evidence doesn't really line up that way (most religion inc. mine IMHO as a Christian), or if the evidence lines up that way and there is social consensus (we're probably not going to get lots out of interstellar space races).
Freddie, I plead with you: stay on topic. I’m sure it feels good to call everyone who’s more excited than you about AI an emotionally stunted manchild afraid to confront the real world, but it’s not a productive contribution to the debate. [...] The only way to check the balance of someone’s checking account is to check the balance on their checking account. Anything else is a waste of everyone's time.
It depends on Freddie's goals. If he wants to persuade the undecided middle and silence his opponents, bulverism is the most powerful tool in his box, as it amounts to social shaming. This comment by @Iconochasm puts it well.
As the saying goes, you can't reason someone out of the position they didn't reason themselves into. You definitely can, however, shame them for being low-status losers until they rationalize themselves out of their stupid beliefs and get their kid fucking vaccinated.
Likewise, you can get many techno-optimists (or techno-pessimists) to clam up if you threaten to cross-examine their personal failings. "You want Fully Automated Luxury Communism because your life sucks and you're coping", "You want industrial civilization to be in decline because you're a cubicle drone who think's he'd be Immortan Joe after collapse", etc etc
These accusations work very well if even slightly plausible. Of course, it's a symmetrical weapon. Social shaming via bulverism about racists is the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike keeping HBD from being publicly acknowledged, and it's almost certainly true. If you actually want to control public opinion, bulverism versus fact-checking is a gun to a knife fight.
As for Freddie and AI though, I could levy a bit of bulverism at him — and I am an LLM skeptic myself. Why is he so desperate to prove the AI optimists wrong, if he is so convinced the passage of time will do that anyway?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1mo ago
Spicy and educational.
aardvark2
1mo ago
Even if you find a result that applies to "nigerian immigrants in america" the selection effects of immigration would invalidate extending the result to "nigerians in nigeria."
Once we know how genetic variants that Nigerians have affect IQ in f2 hybrids in WEIRD countries, we can get much smaller samples of genomes of Nigerians in Nigeria and extrapolate what IQ they would have if brought to WEIRD countries.
it doesn't matter how weak or strong IQ selection effects are for it-- every group will aproach it asymptotically over time
No, evolution doesn't work this way. There always has to be stabilizing selection against novel deleterious mutations. A stronger selection on a gene means weaker selection on another gene. E.g. Europeans have higher rates of color blindness than Africans even if it's single-gene with no tradeoffs. And if "ideal brain" is heterozygous then selection no matter how strong will never reach it.
The very recent past has had extremely different selection pressures than the agricultural and hunter-gatherer past
our industrial society is about 200 years old (much less in many parts of world) and had much weaker selection than past, so it barely affected genetic IQs, except, maybe, reducing inbreeding. In some ways IQ is more important in modern society than past, but it doesn't result in people having more children, so no selection.
then those same differences should be that much more visible between, say, Italians and Poles,
in probably existed at some point in past Poland and Italy had difference because Italy became agricultural earlier. Now effect of agriculture reached saturation.
HBD people think that Papuans have higher IQs than Australian aborigines, and that most of remote branches of Africans like pygmies and San have lower IQs than agricultural Africans, so this holds.
or Madagascarans and Kenyans.
Do you know Madagascar was populated long after agriculture and its population originated from mix of agricultural SE Asians and agricultural Africans?
But at least so far, we've explained only a tiny part of sub-racial and inter-racial IQ differences this way.
A large part seems to be explained by Cold Winter Theory. We can't always explain how species evolve -- there might be long stages of little change and short pulses of rapid change, this doesn't mean that there are no differences.
faceh
1mo ago
And yet there's a whole genre of social media post where a loanholder bemoans the fact that making minimum/interest only payments results in the debt increasing/never going down. or doesn't even bother to check.
(some of these might be playing dumb, but I think most are honest).
I'm genuinely uncertain which percentage of loanholders are literally too innumerate to get what interest and debt ARE. Its more than 1%. I'd bet more than 10%, honestly.
You could put the actual amortization table in front of them and it might not click.
Look at how many people who end up on Caleb Hammer's show are women. (yes, selection effects are in play).
You cannot convince me that these folks should have been entrusted with the ability to take out 5 figure loans.
See also: This recent tweet.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1mo ago
C'mon dude. If this is the third draft of the essay, I really expect more substantial rebuttal than this.
The point was to illustrate a common failure mode and explain why LLMs often struggle with relatively simple tasks like counting.
And that illustration was wrong. You're not acknowledging that. LLMs do not act the way you describe them.
You go on a whole tangent trying to explain how I need to understand that people do not interact with the LLM directly when I very explicitly stated that "most publicly available "LLMs" are not just an LLM. They are an LLM plus an additional interface layer that sits between the user and the actual language model."
No, you're missing my point again. I'm drawing a distinction between base models, which aren't RLHFd, and production LLMs, which have the assistant persona instilled in them. That is a very important thing to keep in mind.
I find your fish vs birds and judging whales by their ability to climb trees examples unconvincing for the same reasons as @Amadan below.
I elaborated further in my own reply to Amadan.
That analogy can and has been abused, most often to deny the idea that humans can be graded on their intellectual abilities. But HBD is a story for another time, it is entirely legitimate to use the same intellectual standards within humans, comparing them to other humans.
My whole point is that a great deal more care is needed to compare across species, and LLMs aren't even biological.
If you ask the average American about "AGI" or "AI Risk" what are the images that come to mind? It's Skynet from The Terminator, Cortana from Halo, Data from Star Trek TNG, the Replicants from Blade Runner, or GLaDOS from Portal. They or something like them is where goalposts are and have been for the last century. What do they all have in common? Agentic behavior. It's what makes them characters and not just another computer. So yes my definition of intelligence relies heavily on agentic behavior, and that is by design. Whether you are trying to build a full on robot out of Asimov, or something substantially less ambitious like a self-driving car or autonomous package sorter, agentic behavior is going to a key deliverable. Accordingly I would dismiss any definition of "intelligence" (artificial or otherwise) that did not include it as unfit for purpose.
Why is the opinion of the "average American" the only standard by which to recognize AGI? Is a malevolent robot only evil once its eyes glow red? That's even more ubiquitous in popular understanding.
The Last Question by Asimov, written in 1956, has an example of what is clearly an oracle AI (till the end of the universe, where it spawns a new one). It doesn't run around in a robot body. The AI in E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) features one of the earliest depictions of a machine that humanity consults for all knowledge and decisions.
HAL is closer to an LLM than it is to SkyNet. Modern LLMs can probably come up with better plans than either of them, they're very dumb (barring the unexplained ability to make plasma weapons or time travel)
As I tried to make clear, a human temporarily or permanently made bereft of a body, and less able to exercise their agency is still intelligent.
Hell, I tried to make it clear that oracles can be trivially made into tool AI or agents.
By your definition:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0O8RHxpkcGc
Is an AGI. It's a robot being controlled by an LLM.
Or as discussed in this Nature paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-025-01036-4
Google was already doing that stuff with PaLM via say-can.
You can hook up Gemini to a webcam and a robotic actuator, right now, if that's all you really care about. Seems to meet every aspect of your definition. It perceives the world live, and reacts to it on the fly. Are you now willing to accept that that's an "AGI"? This is hardly theoretical, as YouTube is absolutely awash with videos of people pulling this off.
Moving on, the claim that LLMs "know" when they are lying or hallucinating is something you and I have discussed before. The claim manages to be trivially true while providing no actionable solution for reasons already described in the OP.
It is far from trivially true, and I wish you would have the grace to accept that you're wrong here. It is also actionable, because mechanistic interpretability allows for us to clamp, ablate and boost particular sub-systems within LLMs. SOTA models are largely proprietary, but I have little doubt that such techniques are being applied to production models. Anthropic showed off Golden Gate Claude over a year back. Such techniques offer the obvious route to both improve truthfulness in models, and to both detect and eliminate hallucinations.
I had forgotten how much of your previous weak critique to the same evidence was based off naked credentialism. After all, you claimed:
As such, I took the liberty of looking into the names associated with your 3 studies and managed to positively identify the professional profiles of 10 of them. Of those 10, none appear to hold any patents in the US or EU or have their names associated with any significant projects. Only 3 appear to have done much (if any) work outside of academia at the time the linked study was posted. Of those 3, only 1 stood out to me as having notable experience or technical chops. Accordingly, I am reasonably confident that I know more about this topic than the people writing or reviewing those studies.
If you're going to lean so heavily on your credentials in robotics, then I agree with @rae or @SnapDragon that it's shameful to come in and be wrong, confidently and blatantly wrong, about such elementary things such as the reasons behind LLMs struggling with arithmetic. I lack any formal qualifications in ML, but even a dummy like me can see that. The fact that you can't, let's just say it raises eyebrows.
The LessWrong stuff is not even wrong, and I find it astonishingly naive of you to assume that the simple human preference for truth is any match for Lorem Epsom. To volley one of your own favorite retorts back at you. "Have you met people".
I have, in fact, met all kinds of people. Including those less truthful than LLMs.
You keep claiming that my definition of "intelligence" is inadequate and hobbling my understanding but I get the impression that I have a much clearer idea of both where we are and where we are trying to get to in spite of this.
If you think you have a better solution present it, as I said one of the first steps to solving any practical engineering problem is to determine your parameters.
I'll take your word for it. My solution is to:
The companies that spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI are doing just fine. Each year, or more like every other month, their products get more capable, and more agentic. If you're offering a ground-breaking and paradigm shattering take yourself, I'm not seeing it.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
The same site also lists Animal Farm and Nineteen eighty-four as staples of English courses. I agree that Orwell intended Nineteen eighty-four to be a general warning against totalitarianism but both when it was published in 1948 and now it is seen as primarily anti-Communist. Animal Farm is straightforwardly anti-Communist.
FWIW, the anti-Nazi lit I was exposed to in school was mostly of the refugee memoir variety (The Silver Sword and I am David) which doesn't represent the USSR very positively either. We also read Animal Farm and we looked at excerpts from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich when we were studying "Why translating serious literary fiction is hard."
Are they really?
In the 2020 census data, Pooler had a population of 25,711, of which Asians made up 6%. Going off the numbers in your excerpt, the Asian population is now up to about 14%; a large increase for sure, but still a minority. Assuming none of the recent arrivals are white, the white population has declined from 54% in 2020 to 45% in 2025, hardly what I'd consider replacement-level demographic change even in the worst-case scenario. This isn't to say that the locals aren't entitled to have their own opinions on their community demographics, or that it could become true demographic replacement in the future, but your assertion here seems mostly baseless.
Also come on, changing one's name is absolutely evidence of assimilation, not perfect evidence nor sufficient evidence, but evidence nonetheless. It sounds like you've taken the Arctotherium-pill writ Asian migration, and while I can't contest the raw stats he highlights I'm still skeptical of the strength of his claims. (Honestly, I don't trust him in general, he comes off as much more cunning and calculated in his rhetoric than other HBDers, who mostly seem quite genuine.)
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