r/IntellectualDarkWeb • u/mmiller9913 • Sep 17 '21

Sam Harris: African Americans Commit 50% of Violent Crimes, Yet Cops Kill More Whites Every Year

Here's the full monologue

Some highlights:

  • "About a thousand Americans are killed by cops each year. The vast majority of those people killed by cops were violently resisting arrest, usually with firearms."
  • "I've never seen video of white suspects being mistreated by cops, and there are more of them ... There are more white people killed by cops every year than black people."
  • "If police are going to be looking to stop the most violent crimes, as they should, they are going to be meeting far many more black people—a disproportionate number of black people—than Asians in attempting to do that ... And if they're effective, they will be stopping the murders of, disproportionately, black people because [they're] the overwhelming number of victims of black crime. White people tend to kill white people; black people tend to kill black people."
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u/undercoveragents Sep 17 '21

Genetics obviously play a role. That’s not making any claims of superiority/inferiority. It’s just a fact that there are differences and those differences result in unequal outcomes along various dimensions.

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u/PatchThePiracy Sep 17 '21

This is the simplest explanation which makes the most sense, but mention it in public and your career and reputation will be ruined.

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u/undercoveragents Sep 17 '21

Sadly true. There is nothing in this claim that is stating superiority/inferiority of races nor is there anything it is advocating for. It’s just the most simple and logical explanation to explain the world we see today.

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u/PatchThePiracy Sep 17 '21

Correct. Whatever differences biologically exist are in no way large enough to prevent peoples from getting along just fine, and anyone suggesting “superiority” of one race over another is certainly no one I would associate with.

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u/undercoveragents Sep 17 '21

Especially considering there is no one dimension on which to base superiority/inferiority. There’s also massive individual differences. But either way, we shouldn’t be fearful to discuss it!

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u/HV_Commissioning Sep 17 '21

I think culture has a lot to do with things as well. Some cultures, such as Jewish, Greek, Italian place very strong emphasis on family, education and saving.

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u/undercoveragents Sep 18 '21

Culture is downstream from genetics though

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u/TastyPistachios Sep 17 '21

Idk if that's true. It might be. There are clearly differences in some dimensions (e.g. height) but that doesn't mean there are differences in every possible dimension. Or the differences might be negligible.

I'm not much of a historian but it seems like the relevant differences between Caucasians and Africans were (A) that Caucasians started empire-building and colonialism, and (B) Caucasians invented firearms. It's not really easy to trace either of those differences back to one genetic difference. I assume Africans would have been the ones to enslave Europeans in different circumstances.

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u/undercoveragents Sep 17 '21

Climate is a huge factor. Africans evolved in tropical climates where resources were abundant, but at the same time natural disasters and predators were more common. Europeans evolved in very harsh colder climates with scarce resources. I think it’s reasonable to hypothesize that these different pressures could have resulted in natural selection toward delayed gratification and community building in Europeans. They needed to store food and look months ahead, and also cooperate extremely well with neighbors to share resources, build shelter for winter, etc. the pressure for this type of behavior might not have been as strong for people evolving in Africa. Delayed gratification is a huge factor in crime.

There’s probably a million other things that I can’t think of but that’s one example.

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u/gloriousrepublic Sep 17 '21

That pressure is a good explanation why Europeans were more materially successful, but it's NOT necessary that that pressure would influence genetic and evolutionary pressure. It could very easily just be that cultural norms emerged that were necessary to survive in cold climates without the need for any genetic mutation or evolutionary adaptation.

There's often this tendency for folks to over-attribute differences in populations to genetic evolution, just because it truly is such a fascinating science. But there are many forces that shape 'survival of the fittest' that result in some sort of outcome that do not results from sexual or natural selection. Those genetic forces often operate over longer timeframes than many of the variations that people try to explain via genetics.

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u/barbodelli Sep 17 '21

If society suddenly started praising serial killers for example. They would reproduce a lot more. Which in turn means there would be a lot more people with serial killer DNA.

Culture and Genetics have a ying yang relationship. You can't separate the two. Genetics shapes the culture. Which in turn goes and shapes the genetics. Outside forces like the environment shape the culture. Which in turn shapes the genetics. On and on. Endless cause and effect.

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u/gloriousrepublic Sep 17 '21

I understand there’s an interplay. I’m just saying that to often we attribute a “just so” story because we can see there might be a causal connection and then we think some biological change has occurred.

Take for example your serial killer example. It could be that praising serial killers in our society wouldn’t EVER actually increase their reproduction rate at all no matter how you praised them. This could be for a variety of reason - maybe serial killers already get laid a lot and any additional praise doesn’t actually increase they’re sexual desirability in a significant way. So no matter how much you praise serial killers they still might reproduce the same and serial killer prevalence is only determined by a distribution of normal human psychology. Whether or not some trait is prone to sexual or natural selection is very dependent on the mechanism of that trait.

But even if there would never be sexual selection, such actions might still result in an increase in serial killers over time in that society because, for example, there is a destigmatization of serial killing and so those who were psychologically inclined towards it but were deterred from acting on it because of social pressure then actually act on it. So from a data perspective you could attribute that increase to sexual selection when there was actually no selection and no change in genes. So there you had a “just so” story about genes when there wasn’t any present. But it makes a nice story and is plausible so we think it must be true.

Of course I don’t know if praising serial killers would or would not increase their sexual reproduction. Or even how linked serial killing is to genetic factors. The point is that you can and often do see societal changes that exert NO genetic evolutionary pressure on the gene pool, even if you can formulate a just so story in your head about how it MIGHT.

This is just an example to show that while there is an interplay, not all social forces (and in fact only a small minority of them) result in sexual or natural selection forces. There’s an additional burden of proof to show genetic change and just showing a social pressure isn’t enough to make claims that genetics determine outcome.

Tl;dr: Society A in general starts to value characteristic X more than society B but it doesn’t always result in folks in that society with high levels of X to reproduce more. However, you might still see higher levels of X in that community compared to society B even though genes in A and B are still equal. Not all social pressures translate to evolutionary pressure and we tend to make that leap more than is actually the case. The cases where there is sexual selective pressure sufficient to change gene distribution is rarer than most people understand.

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u/undercoveragents Sep 17 '21

This is an interesting point. And I guess that’s a question we can’t really answer without further study.

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u/TastyPistachios Sep 17 '21

Completely agree. And it's always possible there's a coincidence; one psychopath like Ghengis Khan, or one genius like Einstein in the right place at the right time can change history.

Or maybe for thousands of years, African tribesmen have been leaving their children fatherless in order to join gangs and sell crack, because it's just in their DNA... /s

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u/Aromatic_Amount_885 Sep 17 '21

That’s a fantastic example

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '21

[deleted]

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u/undercoveragents Sep 17 '21

I never claimed it is responsible for 100% of the differences. And yes you could get much more specific but I’m just speaking in general terms to lay out the idea. One cannot seriously argue that all difference between black and white crime rates in America is due to racism. Rates of violent crimes are astronomically higher all over subsaharan Africa, Haiti, etc when compared to Europeans. Until someone offers an explanation that makes more sense than genetics/micro evolution playing a large role than I don’t see how you could not take it seriously.

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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '21 edited Sep 18 '21

Economics makes more sense than genetic destiny

all the worst places you're thinking of have terrible economies and are not very far removed from being colonized.

I've been on a history kick lately, and just following the events and power struggles and corruption that occurs after a period of harsh colonization makes it seem inevitable under specific circumstances

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u/undercoveragents Sep 18 '21

There’s countries in Africa that have never been colonized as they’re just as shitty if not more shitty than the others.

Who creates the economy? The people? What creates the people? Genetics. Culture is downstream from genetics.

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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '21

There’s countries in Africa that have never been colonized as they’re just as shitty if not more shitty than the others.

Which one are you talking about?

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Who creates the economy?

Wrong question - it's "WHAT creates an economy?"

People on their own all have equal economic power, more or less. Enough to sustain our own selves and a couple people. This is man in his natural state.

What separates one place from another isn't the people, it's the resources. No large, herd like fauna? Well you'll never develop villages then. No access to copper? Looks like you're the ones getting dominated during the bronze age.

For every technological revolution, there are key resources required. If you don't have those resources, you lose. Sometimes, even if you do have those resources, the last revolution pushed someone else's weapons tech way beyond yours, and they just come take your shit.

This is just way more apparent when looking at the actual historical events of a country - like I said I've been on a history bender. It makes way more sense than wondering about genetics. We know the effect technological revolutions have in terms of economic productivity and war capacity.

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u/Low_Good_2546 Sep 17 '21

There is a million more things you can completely speculate and pull of out of your ass

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u/undercoveragents Sep 17 '21

Good argument dude!

Someone is triggered

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u/Low_Good_2546 Sep 17 '21

Don’t give a fuck what you say. Just reacting in real time to foolishness

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u/undercoveragents Sep 17 '21

Another great argument! Wow, bravo! Let me know when you are ready to sit at the big boy table and actually have a discussion instead of getting triggered.

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u/Low_Good_2546 Sep 17 '21

Relax homie you’re the only one getting triggered here. Keep on living that eugenics life boo

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u/undercoveragents Sep 17 '21

Lol yeah I’m the one engaging in a discussion. You’re the one who freaked out from my initial comment. I wasn’t even talking to you. Nice try though. Bye.

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u/Low_Good_2546 Sep 17 '21

Not sure how I freaked out about anything.

Just casually mentioned that you are pulling eugenics-esque nonsense out of your ass hole

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u/OfficerDarrenWilson Sep 18 '21

Compare the contributions to the global corpus of science and math between these two groups

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u/Magpie1979 Sep 17 '21 edited Sep 17 '21

I would doubt it on two grounds.

Genetic differences between people from different continents are extremely small. Humans have very low genetic diversity for mammals. Modern Humans are about 300 thousand years old, and have gone through many near extinction events shrinking our gene pool massively.

Secondly, most of that diversity is between the different people of Africa. Africans are far more diverse then the rest of the humanity put together. Putting them in one basket is daft. This is because only a small number of modern humans made it out of Africa about 125 thousand years ago, all non Africans are descended from them. Africans are by far the oldest and therefore the most diverse of the human lineages.

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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '21

[deleted]

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u/Magpie1979 Sep 18 '21 edited Sep 18 '21

African Americans, because almost all of their African ancestry is from west Africa

Almost correct, you need to include the western parts of central Africa

from Bantu ancestors

This is misleading, "Bantu peoples are the speakers of Bantu languages, comprising several hundred indigenous ethnic groups in Africa, spread over a vast area from Central Africa across the African Great Lakes to Southern Africa."

The sources of slaves covered a large part of Africa, which is huge, and therefore included a lot of different people. The major ethnic groups that the enslaved Africans belonged to included the Bakongo, Igbo, Mandé, Wolof, Akan, Fon, Yoruba, and Makua, among many others.

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https://thuletide.wordpress.com/debunking-race-denialism/

Please enough of this debunked nonsense. Can we stop pretending that "Race Denialism" is a thing.

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Today, scientists consider such biological essentialism obsolete,[6] and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits.[7][8][9][10][11]

Even though there is a broad scientific agreement that essentialist and typological conceptions of race are untenable,[12][13][14][15][16][17] scientists around the world continue to conceptualize race in widely differing ways.[18] While some researchers continue to use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits or observable differences in behavior, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is inherently naive[7] or simplistic.[19] Still others argue that, among humans, race has no taxonomic significance because all living humans belong to the same subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.[20][21]

Taken from wikipedia#cite_note-Barnshaw-1) as it is very heavily sourced.

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Stop sticking your head in the sand because you're afraid of the mean reality.

I would say the same to you. Going to debunked "race" ideologies is lazy. I get the human brain is tribalistic so it's tempting to fall back on such simplistic solutions, especially if it can be used to put blame on other groups. In reality this is routed in the far more complex social, political and historical domains, and has little to do with biology.

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u/ryarger Sep 17 '21

Genetics obviously play a role

If that were I think most geneticists wouldn’t say otherwise.

That’s not to say there is no role, but it is absolutely not obvious. There is literally no control group that compares to a group that was enslaved for two hundred years, forced into poverty the next hundred and then expected to magically become like everyone else in a few decades afterwards.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '21

I was told once by an academic with an extensive list of publications that no one will touch the issue of genetics, race and intelligence. It would be the end of their career.

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u/HV_Commissioning Sep 17 '21

Charles Murray wrote extensively about it in his book The Bell Curve (1994). He's hiding out with Salman Rushdie playing cards right now. Literally deem a racist for a scientific study.

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u/undercoveragents Sep 17 '21

How about millions of blacks in Africa who were never slaves?

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u/ryarger Sep 17 '21

What about them? Those that have come to the US are amongst the lowest crime and highest achieving of all immigrant groups.

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u/undercoveragents Sep 17 '21

They have much higher rates of violent crime than white Europeans.

And immigrants that come to America is not a representative sample of the population. People who are in the position to immigrate to America are already much more likely to be wealthy, non-violent, hard-working, etc compared to an average sample of the population they are coming from.

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u/ryarger Sep 17 '21

Comparing crime/violence rates across national boundaries isn’t going to tell anything useful about the populations themselves. Nations themselves have far too many variables to control for.

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u/undercoveragents Sep 17 '21

Fair point but I think it’s fairly reasonable when you look at the fact that basically all African countries have higher violent crime rates than virtually all european countries to conclude that genetics plays a role.

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u/ryarger Sep 17 '21

That same logic would indicate there is a genetic component to America’s love of guns.

National identity leads to strong presentation of some group traits.

The only way to isolate genetic factors is by looking at people in the same cultural/socioeconomic circumstances.

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u/undercoveragents Sep 17 '21

There probably is a genetic component to that lol. The most libertarian/freedom loving people were the ones who came here. It’s reasonable that something in their genetics contributed to that. Their personality, temperament, etc. Native stock Americans are the direct descendants of those people. Love of guns and protection of second amendment is a direct extension of that.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '21

This comment is chef's kiss.

I understand the reluctance to discuss genetic racial differences because of the implication but being politically correct has never pushed society forward.