posted on September 29, 2020 04:45 AM by
u/khodahafezdadash
60
u/Masebrock73 pointsat 1601360792.000000
So now we’re seeing the logical outcome of this official narrative:
The beginnings or hardening of state and institutional coercion designed
to force equal outcomes.
A hereditarian explanation for race IQ gaps is the most powerful
weapon available to stop this.
I want everyone to stop and notice this. He is saying out loud
something that most rationalists and “HBD” usually try to keep hidden
under the mask:
He is advocating for racist propaganda as a vehicle to advance
and justify libertarian capitalism. He is a capitalist first and
foremost, and his racism flows from there.
Knowing that people are starting to get rather queasy at all these
increasingly impoverished masses, he has taken up the mantle of racism
as simply a means to rhetorically wave it all away. To get you to think
“no, the poor deserve to suffer because they are inherently,
genetically, dumb and bad.” It’s not mindless xenophobia, but a
calculated decision used in service of navigating the discourse, with
the purpose of his whole argument to justify existing capitalist
institutions.
The racism is just a pawn in this game. Strike it down, and he’ll
come up with something else.
As state and cultural coercion mounts to force equal outcomes among
innately or culturally unequal groups, anger and frustration in
higher-performing groups will exceed levels of tolerance. The breaking
point will be convulsive, ugly, and perhaps even violent.
Basically “don’t tax me or I’ll kill you”. This guy is, on the
inside, just the a boring-ass Murray Rothbard-quoting libertarian. But
he’s cosplaying as David Duke, because that’s the only chance at
relevance he has. It says a lot about the ideological state of
capitalism, that they think overt racism may be a less bitter pill for
the public to swallow.
But the craziest thing about this whole gambit, to me, is that is relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates the Left.
It's just a classic typical-mind fallacy, assuming that socialists aren't motivated by total human welfare, but are instead meritocrats or desert-theorists like he is. He thinks that by showing that non-white people are inherently genetically inferior, he is proving that non-white people don't deserve material support, because they wouldn't have "earned" that additional income on the marketplace anyway (due to their intellectual handicaps).
Okay. *But I don't give a shit* what people would have "earned" on a hypothetical free market without racism. If you want to tell me that, actually, its not because of ablest discrimination that a quadriplegic doesn't have any money, it's just that he produces *no value in the labor market*, I'm like, okay who cares, give him his disability check all the same. There are lots of groups that don't produce market value (children, the elderly) who we support via the welfare state. You think you are doing a clever "own" by saying that, in a meritocratic libertarian capitalist system, blacks would actually still be poorer than whites, but *even if you were to convince me of that* all you're really doing is convincing me to just send them bigger welfare checks.
this is why im so tired of liberals complaining about a "false" meritocracy. meritocracy itself is stupid. why should one's ability to complete arbitrary tasks determine things like life expectancy and the ability to reproduce successfully? its fucking crazy if you think about it critically for one second. i guess it makes sense that once fully unfolded you get a straight answer: eugenics.
Meritocracy makes sense if you're picking people for a job, get the best person in the role. But anything beyond that, including quality of life or access to resources, why?
The LessWrong wiki literally says
>The typical mind fallacy is the mistake of modelling the minds inside other people's brains as exactly the same as your own mind.
It’s a summary bent towards the most sympathetic LessWrong perspective on things (the phrase “Motte and Bailey” is relevant here), not an unbiased or necessarily honest account of how the term is used
Beyond that, there’s no obvious reason to think that there is any such fallacy: it isn’t really the case that assuming other people think like you is fallacious
I would call this something like “a vacuous truth”: certainly it is true that people model other’s minds on their own - sometimes falsely - but this is not enough to reify that fact as either a formal or informal fallacy: it’s simply an observation to keep in mind when self-reflecting on one’s own thoughts
In contrast, the “fallacy” - such as it is - gets weaponised in the mouths of people from the rationalist cult as a *failure of reasoning* unto itself, which is obviously silly
The “typical mind fallacy” is a coinage by Eliezer Yudkowsky (the sub’s original main target), who is known for his silly self-coined jargon
It roughly denotes the idea that it is fallacious to assume that everybody else thinks or should think like you do
But it isn’t really an actual fallacy, except in the most vacuous sense: obviously if anybody were to imagine that everybody thought like them it would be fallacious, on the other hand it’s not fallacious to impose one’s moral beliefs on somebody else (so not a fallacy). It’s just an example of something like “projection” which already existed as a concept long before he tried to buy it for himself with the coinage. It’s also usefully vague: you can accuse basically anybody of the “typical mind fallacy” just for disagreeing with you.
It reminds me of the Stefan Molyneux/Nazi argument that “society has problems because leftists force genetically incompatible people to exist in the same space.” If we just separate the races and put women back in their place, all of societies woes will vanish. And black people will be happier when they’re not asked to do things beyond their station.
> Knowing that people are starting to get rather queasy at all these increasingly impoverished masses, he has taken up the mantle of racism as simply a means to rhetorically wave it all away. To get you to think "no, the poor deserve to suffer because they are inherently, genetically, dumb and bad." It's not mindless xenophobia, but a calculated decision used in service of navigating the discourse, with the purpose of his whole argument to justify existing capitalist institutions.
Functionally no different than the aristocrats who justified their wealth by their "virtues" in the 19th or 18th century.
> He is advocating for racist propaganda as a vehicle to advance and justify libertarian capitalism. He is a capitalist first and foremost, and his racism flows from there.
I feel like a spelunker and this is the largest cave of stupidity I have ever seen. This is truly the deepest, pitch-black trench. How can these guys go outside to their normal boring-ass suburban white collar lives and look themselves in the mirror after engaging their Nazi fantasies online? Sorry, I meant *Nazi Capitalism*
Mostly agree but I'm always a lil skeptical of deriving racism from capitalism because capitalism was made possible by colonialism (hi east India trading company)
Mostly agree but I'm always a lil skeptical of deriving racism from capitalism because capitalism was made possible by colonialism (hi east India trading company)
Let’s begin with this: It is scientifically uncontroversial that
average IQ differs between races.
Hmm. IQ is definitely scientifically controversial, and race is…well,
I would actually say there’s now near-complete consensus about there
being no scientific basis for race, but for the sake of argument let’s
say race is still controversial too. I guess when you, uhh, divide race
by IQ the controversial bits cancel out and you’re left with an
uncontroversial quotient?
I mean, where to draw the dividing lines isn't always totally clear but it seems obvious that there are genetically distinct groupings of humans that differ on things like average height or proneness to sickle cell anemia.
> Race is very real. Beyond the visibly obvious components (skin color, body shape, etc)...
Are you saying there’s some kind of phenotypic checklist that we can go down and at the end know definitively what race a person is? If so, please explain what that checklist looks like and which combination of results correspond to which races.
Or maybe you’re saying that certain phenotypic traits just cluster more highly on average inside these real racial boundaries but don’t define them - in which case I’d ask you to explain precisely what *does* define these real boundaries, then.
> there are cultural components and institutional components.
Certainly, but these don’t constitute real boundaries in and of themselves.
All your comment shows is that race doesn't exist in a discrete state. A person has traits that align with or do not align with other people.
There are a large group of "African Americans." They individually come from many tribes. Down the line, they intermixed with people of other tribes or of vastly different races. Does that make them cease to be African American? No. Does that make their race not exist? Definitely not.
Their cultural experience is shaped by their interactions with broader American culture and their history of oppression.
Their physical characteristics could be classified with a k mean squares algorithm or whatever other approach someone could choose to come up with. This isn't necessary though, because out biological brains are plenty capable of pattern matching to one race or another.
The fact that a person might rest somewhere along a racial continuum that is ambiguous does not make race cease to exist.
I feel that this is so inherently obvious it shouldn't require a mathematical or a scientific breakdown. The insistence by some that race doesn't exist probably hurts the credibility of the academic community a great deal.
> The fact that a person might rest somewhere along a racial continuum that is ambiguous does not make race cease to exist.
It certainly makes it not exist as a natural kind or real boundary between categories. What you’ve just described is race antirealism.
I know I'm supposed to engage with your ideas, but they are too empty to argue with. There is nothing of substance to grab onto.
This is the metaphorical equivalent of someone insisting up is down, green is blue, or that fire is cold.
The whole "race isn't real" and/or "race is just a social construct" is the dumbest thing I've read on the internet all week.
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I'm subbed to the slatestarcodex and themotte, so as a rule I have to subscribe to their biggest detractors too, to even things out.
My subscription list must remain in perfect balance.
Note that OP is a criticism of a post on the motte. If I weren't subscribed in both places, I never would have seen that.
That’s stupid. You absolutely don’t need to “even things out”, it makes no sense. It’s not a rule, it’s a choice you make.
What do you gain from this apart from signaling to yourself that you’re “open-minded” and “balanced”?
Edit: Because it’s not like you’ll be changing your viewpoint from “garden-variety rationalist” or even conceding a point, so why?
> It’s not a rule, it’s a choice you make.
It is good to choose not to exist in echo-chambers.
> What do you gain from this apart from signaling to yourself that you’re “open-minded” and “balanced”?
Existing in echo-chambers is harmful. It leads the mind down a path of extremism and absolutism. People should seek to break their echo-chambers at every opportunity.
If my beliefs are sound, they will withstand the existence of criticism. If they are not, then they need to be re-examined.
> If my beliefs are sound, they will withstand the existence of criticism. If they are not, then they need to be re-examined.
Ah! This must be why, when your risible 19th-century beliefs about race science are criticized, you respond by loftily declaring that their truth is so self-evident that there's no need to reexamine them. Right?
So I'm racist because I admit that race is a real thing? Do you want me to re-examine that? Hold on, let me google some pictures of Obama. That's an African American, I just saw one!
As a human being with two eyes in my face, I can see race. As someone with a pretty solid grasp of technology, I can train a computer to identify race with a high degree of accuracy. I can get off-the-shelf software that does that for commercial purposes.
There is clearly, *obviously*, visibly a physical component of race. If you want to deny that, go on ahead, but I'm going to call that out as some dumb-as-rocks ivory tower nonsense because that's what it is.
So although Africa is more genetically diverse than the rest of the world combined—and clearly not the sole producer of dark-pigmented people, your conclusion is "Race is real, because hey look at that black guy."
"Race is real, I can see it."
"Fire is real, it burns when I touch it."
"Birds are real, they steal my bread."
Etc.
If you want to dispute immediately obvious things, go ahead. Maybe there is some killer argument that is compelling.
For example:
"The Mirage-water is real, I can see it!" "But the mirage water seems to keep moving away from me. Water doesn't normally do that, so the mirage-water must be something else. I've noticed I only see it in hot places, usually when it's dry. Maybe it has something to do with the sun? It clearly isn't water, though. It doesn't leave a wet spot, and that much water wouldn't evaporate in the time it takes to walk that distance."
Another good example:
"Maggots auto-generate from meat." "I put this meat in a jar and no maggots formed on it, ergo maggots to not auto-generate from meat."
> So I'm racist because I admit that race is a real thing?
You know, I actually haven't accused you of being a racist yet. I do, if you're wondering, *infer* that you're a racist, but hey, we'll see how this plays out. Mostly you just seem very confused.
Let's set aside, for a minute, your conflation of brown skin or African-American ethnicity with race (although we should come back to that, because it's very stupid). Let's think back, instead, to the late 18th and early 19 centuries, when Europeans explored and colonized Southeast Asia, Australia, and the South Pacific.
The prevailing race science of the day divided humanity into three main races (caucasoid, mongoloid, and negroid) and each of those into various subraces. When Europeans found dark-skinned, wide-nosed, kinky-haired people living in these areas, they recognized them as "negroids." Some of them, like the Negritoes, they surmised to be closely related to Central African pygmies; they bore a striking physical resemblance. Others, like the Aboriginal Australians, they recognized as a more distant branch of the race, less closely related to Africans, but still clearly "black" and not Asian. It was extremely *obvious* to them. Two eyes in their face, etc. etc.
And guess what? They were completely fucking wrong, because all of their ideas about race were thoroughly unscientific horseshit, and the "plain, obvious" things they could see with their own two eyes were horribly distorted by their dumbass white supremacist ideas (the same idiot race scientists also wrote off marginal European ethnic groups, like the Sami, as nonwhite, because duh, look how poor and primitive they are, obviously if they were white they'd be doing something more civilized than herding reindeer). None of those groups is any more closely related to people from Central Africa than the Queen of England is. They're most closely genetically related to, *shockingly,* other Southeast Asian peoples.
Except, you're here in bad faith, and you aren't engaging with ideas outside of your echo chamber:
>I know I'm supposed to engage with your ideas, but they are too empty to argue with. There is nothing of substance to grab onto.
>This is the metaphorical equivalent of someone insisting up is down, green is blue, or that fire is cold.
>The whole "race isn't real" and/or "race is just a social construct" is the dumbest thing I've read on the internet all week.
[link](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/j1slws/the_left_is_covering_up_racial_iq_differences_to/g72iwp4)
I am engaged in good faith. My comments are a factual representation of what I a believe and an honest reveal of my perception. In the words of the SSC crowd, I can't "steel man" this argument. It is totally divorced from reality as I perceive it.
To argue in "bad faith," I would need to present arguments I did not believe were true and represent them as my true perception of the world.
Why should anyone’s beliefs be sound? They’re usually incoherent and contradictory and there is absolutely no need for them to be sound unless they’re philosophers and ideologues.
Besides, recommendation algorithms build echo chambers more than people construct it for themselves, it’s faster to reduce the tracking that social media and websites like Youtube do than manually subscribe to contrary sources
> Why should anyone’s beliefs be sound?
Everyone should constantly try to improve their understanding of the world. If they become aware of an inconsistency in their beliefs, they should try to understand that inconsistency and hopefully correct it.
> They’re usually incoherent and contradictory and there is absolutely no need for them to be sound unless they’re philosophers and ideologues.
If only philosophers and ideologues have sound beliefs, then they are unfortunate hostages in a world of madness. I like to hope that they can share their knowledge and help lift us all up from our primitive states.
> Besides, recommendation algorithms build echo chambers more than people construct it for themselves, it’s faster to reduce the tracking that social media and websites like Youtube do than manually subscribe to contrary sources
Blocking advertising isn't nearly enough to break echo-chambers. When we choose to only associate with people of our own tribe, we blind ourselves to other worldviews.
By maintaining a feed of information that is outside my worldview, I find a lot of information that changes my worldview that I never would have seen otherwise.
I wouldn't say my worldview is "coherent," but it has changed (and hopefully improved) rapidly over the last decade.
> I feel that this is so inherently obvious it shouldn't require a mathematical or a scientific breakdown. The insistence by some that race doesn't exist probably hurts the credibility of the academic community a great deal.
You might also, if you grew up in a different era dominated by different junk-science ideas, believe that any of the following was "so inherently obvious it shouldn't require a mathematical or a scientific breakdown":
* the Earth is flat
* maggots arise spontaneously from dead flesh
* people with an excess of yellow bile among their humors are bitter and aggressive
* eels are born when horse hairs fall into ponds
Race never existed in any material sense. It's always been a social (or, more to the point, political) construct. Even the most "visibly obvious" markers of race don't accord very well in practice with theories of racial taxonomy. Look at epicanthal folds, for instance. Or skin color, for that matter.
Race is visibly obvious. Our brains are plenty capable of pattern matching and grouping people by race, but if a person *needed* to come up with a system, they could use a k mean squares algorithm.
The fact that race exists on a spectrum and is sometimes ambiguous does not mean race doesn't exist.
> Our brains are plenty capable of pattern matching and grouping people by race
Yes, it's called apophenia. It's also where we got fortune-telling, numerology, and moon-landing conspiracy theories.
> if a person needed to come up with a system, they could use a k mean squares algorithm.
People have tried for literally hundreds of years to come up such systems, and those systems are all thoroughly, comically worthless. Because race does not have a significant material basis.
> (race is real, and important, and a good basis to legislate on, because some people look different to others along one dimension)
> For a supposed "rationalist"
I have only said race is real. The rest of that is your projection.
What you have done is coded who I am based on a tiny amount of information and made broad assumptions about my beliefs. You have then attacked the one piece of information you know about me because you want to fight the rest of it that you imagine is there.
This is a case of [arguments as soldiers](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Arguments_as_soldiers).
If you would like to discuss any of those other issues, I'm open to doing so if that follows the rules of this subreddit.
Let's not pretend for a moment that the rest of the real world thinks race is fiction.
I would use race as a proxy to measure the impact of racist policies and attempt to reverse the harm.
I would use it as a measuring tool to detect racism in the courts, in schools, and in employment.
Fixing these things is hard, but it impossible to fix an issue you cannot see.
Day 1 of Anthropology 101 I was told by the professor that "race does not exist."
The "rest of the real world," as you call it, is full of flat earthers, climate change and Covid deniers, and (of course) race realists. I don't give a shit what they think.
Why does race have to be real for racism to exist? Only a perception of race is needed. People have perceived many things to exist, especially when it is more convenient for them to exist.
Racism, however, definitely exists; it has been socially constructed to do so, just as the $1 bill exists and has value based on its social construction.
A friend of mine recently pointed this out to me: pollution is also
found to have a negative effect on cognition (not necessarily g
intelligence to be clear, but some neurological health metrics).
Why don’t the IQ guys freak out / get angry over environmental
damage? Shouldn’t that be on the agenda?
Pretty sure most of us don’t deny IQ. We’re just skeptical of what
the tests are/aren’t capable of measuring and what those measurements
can tell us about individuals, groups (especially ones of non-scientific
basis), and societies. Considering the ways we’ve used IQ in the past to
justify atrocities, perhaps being skeptical here is a good idea.
Also, apparently if we deny the absolute heritability and fixedness
of IQ, we are simply deniers of the Inconvenient IQ truth! Never mind
the roles of epigenetic modifications, poverty, stress, iodine
deficiency, etc, etc.
I deny that the Quotient being tested for in IQ is actual intelligence. It should be renamed Arbitrary Quotient, Test Quotient, or Esoteric Quotient.
"Intelligence" is intractable and cannot be pinned down by one test, no matter how capacious. It's fluid; plenty of genuinely smart people like Ben Carson (the brain surgeon) have proven to be equally stupid (the politician).
I suppose the counter argument to this is the usual "discrepancies are smoothed out by population samples." But there's still the problem that the tests require a conformity to "Western" thinking before they check to see if you're good at it. So maybe I'll call it WQ from now on. I think the brain caliper people agree that what they really want is subservience to the idea that Western European and American societies are the pinnacles of human intelligence.
I went to school in an affluent district despite being poor as shit,
and they segregated the black students from the rest of the students in
a town where 95% of population was white. It was always couched such
that they needed to be separated for behavioral or educational
reasons, but I suspect the differences between being brought up poor in
a black family and the upper middle class upbringing that the rest of
the students had were pathologized and used as excuses to separate
them.
I suspect that these types of people have already had their way.
I want everyone to stop and notice this. He is saying out loud something that most rationalists and “HBD” usually try to keep hidden under the mask:
He is advocating for racist propaganda as a vehicle to advance and justify libertarian capitalism. He is a capitalist first and foremost, and his racism flows from there.
Knowing that people are starting to get rather queasy at all these increasingly impoverished masses, he has taken up the mantle of racism as simply a means to rhetorically wave it all away. To get you to think “no, the poor deserve to suffer because they are inherently, genetically, dumb and bad.” It’s not mindless xenophobia, but a calculated decision used in service of navigating the discourse, with the purpose of his whole argument to justify existing capitalist institutions.
The racism is just a pawn in this game. Strike it down, and he’ll come up with something else.
Basically “don’t tax me or I’ll kill you”. This guy is, on the inside, just the a boring-ass Murray Rothbard-quoting libertarian. But he’s cosplaying as David Duke, because that’s the only chance at relevance he has. It says a lot about the ideological state of capitalism, that they think overt racism may be a less bitter pill for the public to swallow.
This twitter account is so bad at covering up their neo-nazi sensibilities.
Hmm. IQ is definitely scientifically controversial, and race is…well, I would actually say there’s now near-complete consensus about there being no scientific basis for race, but for the sake of argument let’s say race is still controversial too. I guess when you, uhh, divide race by IQ the controversial bits cancel out and you’re left with an uncontroversial quotient?
A friend of mine recently pointed this out to me: pollution is also found to have a negative effect on cognition (not necessarily g intelligence to be clear, but some neurological health metrics).
Why don’t the IQ guys freak out / get angry over environmental damage? Shouldn’t that be on the agenda?
Why is it, always always always, about race?
[deleted]
Pretty sure most of us don’t deny IQ. We’re just skeptical of what the tests are/aren’t capable of measuring and what those measurements can tell us about individuals, groups (especially ones of non-scientific basis), and societies. Considering the ways we’ve used IQ in the past to justify atrocities, perhaps being skeptical here is a good idea.
Also, apparently if we deny the absolute heritability and fixedness of IQ, we are simply deniers of the Inconvenient IQ truth! Never mind the roles of epigenetic modifications, poverty, stress, iodine deficiency, etc, etc.
I went to school in an affluent district despite being poor as shit, and they segregated the black students from the rest of the students in a town where 95% of population was white. It was always couched such that they needed to be separated for behavioral or educational reasons, but I suspect the differences between being brought up poor in a black family and the upper middle class upbringing that the rest of the students had were pathologized and used as excuses to separate them.
I suspect that these types of people have already had their way.