hbd
sodiummuffin
5d 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
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
7d 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
22d 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
23d 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
23d 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
27d 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
30d 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."
iprayiam3
1mo ago
I think you misunderstand me. I was somewhat flippant because I didn't follow that one super closely, and don't remember the upset user in question. My point is more generally that the Motte's moderation philosophy is against 'moral monsters, end of story' framing. this framing was associated more with the left for the past decade, thus why places like the motte exist, and don't exist on Reddit, pre-Musk twitter etc.
But when Turok and Count jumped in, they didn't do it from the left, and the pattern matching of 'the Motte bans leftists' is incorrect.
Fuck bigots, fuck white people, and fuck low human capital, all get banned for a reason other than political association.
I will concede that 'fuck HBD deniers' seems to get a special pass on this space as some kind of legacy protection
Tiber727
1mo ago
Contra Whinning Coil: somebody flaming out because Whinning Coil was allowed to express racist views.
On this, it's not always just the racism element, more that what the mods appear to be selecting for is having a line of how much contempt you are allowed to give off when expressing a view. This seems mostly with the goal of preventing the forum from becoming trading insults back and forth.
Some positions inherently come with animus. There's a reason I scroll past the HBD discussions. But there are times I feel that users get away with a little more spice against groups that aren't typically here than if those groups were here, such as when feminism comes up.
Fascinating, I never knew you were Jewish.
As said, it doesn't really play a role in my life or factor into my views. Besides, "Jewish" is a thoroughgoing exaggeration. "Half-Jewish" is already overselling it by far. I'm German in pretty much every way except for half my genes and some family members. Born in Germany, raised by Germans, lived among Germans ever since, never spent significant time abroad and only ever visit my Jewish relatives for a few days every few years, maybe have a brief phone call every few months and have difficulties relating to them at all on account of them living in different countries (even though I like them and both sides make an effort to stay in contact). I'm an extremely rare statistical anomaly and best filed under "eccentric German" for all practical purposes.
Were your Jewish ancestors Germans before 1939 (or 1933, I suppose)? Did they spend the war in Switzerland, Russia or elsewhere (Spain, America etc)? Did they return immediately after the war or many years later? If they were ur-German Jews, how did they feel (if you know) about the fact that the modern German Jewish community is 80-90%+ ex-Soviets / Eastern Bloc who fled after 1955 (and often after 1980)? I am familiar with some cultural tension. Do you know (locally) any other Germans of immediate (ie. parental) Jewish descent?
I'm honestly a little hazy on the details, but AFAIK they were all over the place, clustering around Austria-Hungary and Romania. It's not impossible that they might trace back to German Jews, but I wouldn't know. I don't know much about my distant relatives, and my close ones actually migrated to Paris rather than Germany. It's complicated and I only have very superficial knowledge of it. They don't have any connections to the Jewish community here. I know a small handful of Jews in my region, but that's purely by coincidence and since I am judaism-illiterate I wouldn't even be able to tell you what kinds of Jews those are.
I've heard some of my family half-joke that it's not jewish heritage at all, and that the origin traces back to Khazars converting to judaism for political reasons. But that doesn't really explain why they do look distinctly jewish.
Also, unlike my somewhat-stereotypically secular Jewish family, the Jews I got to know in Germany are largely pretty screwed up by the tension between their practicing families and their own dissolute lifestyles. They don't really see me as a Jew at all, and expressed exasperation at my ignorance.
It all doesn't go anywhere, is not relevant to anything I am, think or do. HBD-wise it might inform some of my personality traits, but I'm no expert on that.
I really only brought up my jewish non-heritage to illustrate the point that you can absolutely be on The Motte even when some mottizens would, by some metric and in some extended thought experiments, call for your marginalization or for violence against you. You can in fact just shrug that off. It's just talk on the internet.
GBRK
1mo ago
You're requiring undue burden of proof.
"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.
But it looks like most of in-population variation is just slightly broken gene variants of ideal brain devised by evolution for current moment.
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.
think that if you were posting this from pro-HBD pespective, someone could write: A Racist Poster Compares Africans To Wolves By Implication.
I'm not on the motte because I'm interested in being politically correct.
It would make sense to compare teams made of people with similar IQ than than loners.
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.
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
1mo 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
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
1mo ago
daguerrean
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo 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
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1mo 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.
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
conservatismbureaucracy, 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.
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).
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