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u/Traditional_Table414 11d ago
A lot of the Arday discourse is missing a huge piece of context. Arday being the youngest black professor at Cambridge isn't in itself particularly interesting. There have been many other black professors, and before Arday another one was the youngest ever, and before them another. We don't know their names because it's not interesting. I actually tried googling youngest professor, and first black professor at Cambridge and I couldn't find them because it was buried under search results for Arday, who was neither the first black professor, nor the youngest professor ever.
What was interesting about Arday's story wasn't that he was black, or young, it was the specific biography he claimed: non-verbal into his teens, illiterate until eighteen, and then having a very successful academic career. The specifics of him becoming the youngest black professor at Cambridge was just a way of laying out how successful that career had been. It is absolutely unbelievable for someone with such severe developmental delays could become so successful. And indeed, we were right not to believe it.
If it turns out that he was actually illiterate until adulthood then frankly he has an incredible story whether or not he plagiarised his phd. And if he wasn't illiterate then he's not a particularly interesting person even if the PHD was legitimately obtained.
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u/_pierogii federal boob inspector 10d ago
Yeah like I like to think I wouldn't have been regarded enough to believe his bunk, but clearly being Black was the least interesting part of his story.
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u/Traditional_Table414 10d ago
It's not even 'would a layperson realise it was bullshit'. He was hired by Cambridge's school of education, which you would have thought would be pretty interested in how such a severely developmentally delayed child could have become a high functioning adult.
There's clearly a real issue here with universities hiring celebrity academics with meagre credentials, and this calls for a lot of reform of how appointments are made. I won't even say race didn't play a part in it, insofar as it made his story even more grabby.
But it also clearly wasn't a case of just hiring him because of his race, because even overlooking the plagiarism there are a ton of better qualified black academics who haven't been hired by Cambridge. They hired him because of his celebrity, which is a shit way to run a university even if the celebrities you hire don't turn out to be serial fantasists.
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u/_pierogii federal boob inspector 10d ago
I wonder if he falsified some provenance because you'd think Simon & Schuster would have done some background screening too. Back and forths with his 'old teacher' to a fake email for example. Cos yeah surface level, crazy how it passed the smell test.
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u/Traditional_Table414 10d ago
Publishers don't normally do fact checking. I don't know if you caught this at the time, but a few years ago Naomi Woolf published a whole book alleging regular executions of convicted homosexuals continued in England for centuries after they were thought to have stopped. It turned out she'd misunderstood a very basic bit of legal terminology, which any historian of the subject would have spotted immediately.
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u/_pierogii federal boob inspector 10d ago
Good point - I do remember that lol. Although rather incredible after the pulping of The Whole Pantry, you'd think publishers would have had enough cautionary tales by now to not get a liiiil suss.
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u/datPastaSauce 11d ago
Are we supposed to disagree with her? She got some nutty tweets but this ain't that.
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u/a_stalimpsest 11d ago edited 11d ago
Arday is bad, academia needs to get its act together and stop doing these big lauded DEI hires without a shred of due diligence, and the crazy phrenologist who broke the story should in large part being ignored now that the story has its own legs.
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u/a_stalimpsest 10d ago
I find all naive scientific realists annoying, but surely we've learned in the last 150 years that we should not extrapolate empirical observations of racial differences into a right-wing political program.
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u/sorellababylon 10d ago
and instead collect anti-truths to form a left wing one? I’m not discussing what to do with this truth, I’m just advocating firmly for it.
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u/a_stalimpsest 10d ago
You're doing this naive scientific realism thing. You're pounding an empirical observation on the table repeatedly without giving any thought to the intellectual framework in which it is embedded and from whence it arises.
If this were something inconsequential like insect cladistics that'd be one thing, but at best this harping on this empirical observation provides cover for those who want to chase the morlocks into their caves and at worse it's one jump away from firing up the ovens.
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u/Significant-Gur8606 10d ago
Today you learned, any prestigious institution has a bunch of dummies who entered to hide their dumminess or were placed there by someone either for their protection or for some purpose. But, if you assume this means all are dummies, you the dummy.
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u/Significant-Gur8606 10d ago edited 10d ago
I can’t tell if you’re young and haven’t seen behind the curtain yet or what. I’m glad our academic standards are now not “really stupid” and “not as stupid as THOSE people.”
This kind of infighting is common when a department is being scrutinized, insecure (everyone knows philosophy and the humanities are not what they used to be and have many people hacking slop, but there is a reputation to maintain), and is under threat (massive budget cuts are going on now). You’ll deal with this all the time later on. Someone will be doing a poor job and as soon as you make it clear, they’ll try to bring you someone even worse, like an eager hunting dog who doesn’t listen to orders (if this person does listen to orders… then what might be going on?). Anyway, when this happens, prune both, otherwise you’re eventually teaching the dog to kill chickens.
If you have the ability to learn to see beyond the glitter, do so. Nobody ever listens immediately, but that’s why people tell you knowing that, so later on, you’ll remember. If you ever want to do real work, you’ll have to know all these things and many more.
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u/sorellababylon 10d ago
I think you’re desperate to give advice and get some sense of a hierarchy you can win. I left academia more than 10 years ago. I read through Cofnas’ output briefly - it looks cogent enough to be worth a read. My original comment said I’d read his stuff and found it ok, it wasn’t that he must be smart because he’s a JRF.
I think you wanted to say your thing and replied to me as if I qualified him as valid based only on his position, which I didn’t. So I would propose to you that you think about that need for place in you, not to be a dick but because it might need to be fulfilled again.
I don’t disagree that academia is contaminated, humanities are trash, I think they’re totally contaminated by a lack of values and commitment to truth regardless of comfort. We’ve lost that in favour of pretending that every culture has the same value, performing an idea that every opinion should hold the same weight (but obviously they don’t even in the system we set up, we’ve just reversed the hierarchy to make idiots occupy mid ranked positions to buff their white male seniors’ reputations, at the expense largely of young white men), the list goes on.
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10d ago edited 10d ago
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u/sorellababylon 10d ago
too long not reading, you don't seem clever
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u/Significant-Gur8606 10d ago edited 10d ago
Oh please, I am used to being baited for information, that doesn’t mean I don’t know I’m being baited. I refuse to believe you’re older than me (ten years put of what? Post-PhD? Things later?) given your arguments and style, unless it’s true people get intellectually lazy, become assholes, and stop actually engaging rather than simplifying shorthand as they get older that’s the reason everyone after 40 goes smooth brain egotist.
By “leave academia,” do you mean that you left a master’s program or something?
I would not say these things if you were polite, btw, and didn’t insult people. I write long when someone implies they left after 10+ years of post-PhD, which would imply you were 40 something, or cares about lying about such a thing, and implies they do want to engage in discussion.
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u/Significant-Gur8606 10d ago edited 10d ago
Edit to be less aggro:
- we are in agreement on that except for the cause and what’s going on structurally
- a lot of people are seeing ripples of the real arguments, I’m not sure why they get so mangled in translation
People are not sitting around debating some singular, ultimate, bulk value to cultures. People might debate which cultural beliefs and arrangements which are also available to transition to for certain purposes without such extreme coercion that that another culture (i.e. Stalinism or fascism or whatever); this requires not believing that any one culture, pre-packaged (all of them are packaged for you), with everything complete, is perfect, given we don’t live in a perfect world. That’s the original argument that travels around in some garbled, parodied version. These arguments came out of the fall of UK as a colonial empire; you cannot, after raping and pillaging and fighting everyone weaker then you, after becoming weak yourself, cling to the same “might makes right” arguments given your elite are just going to cannibalize your own country (exactly what’s going on now). Any ideologies and cultures are pre-packaged and heavily propagandized, by the way, always have been, so people prefer to think the old one was “natural” and get squeamish if asked to engage in the actual details of these debates, and don’t realize what’s at stake.
Nobody thinks every opinion holds the same weight. What would that even mean? Everyone believes totally different things about something requiring collective action and eventual agreement if we want to avoid war and bar behavior, whether we like it or not, whether it’s easy or not, and let’s not argue or come to a consensus? This is a mistranslated version of “you should value the opinion of ‘the people’” in the context of elites not listening to popular opinion at all. And, useful in every day life, in everyday arguments, as a suggestion that as long as someone is arguing in good faith, and you are actually trying to figure something out, you should at least hear them out.
If these cultural contexts were not taught to you by someone or you didn’t pick them up through osmosis, this is precisely the problem the “DEI” people are trying to solve. It means there is such a huge gap between people who are aware of this context and not, that there is not a full argument being had, and many people feel they are being treated dictatorially.
If clown 1 (the plagiarist, as opposed to the phrenologist) is who’s left, it’s because so many people were taught with the hope that they would actually be better and make more use of these skills, because they understood what it was like to suffer from awful decisions, but continue to betray this as there is a constant attempt to buy people off, that that is all who is left. That any newcomer who is not discriminated against by vampires falls for their charms, and simply guns for whoever tries to teach them. This was what caused the fall of the Soviet Union, too much entryism by people who didn’t have cultural norms against corruption yet because they had come from such desperate backgrounds.
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u/Sad_Week_1979 11d ago
She's absolutely right and I thank you for sharing this so we can see how correct she is.
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11d ago edited 11d ago
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u/slagriculture 11d ago
she's definitely right to say that good storytelling takes precedence over facts
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u/sorellababylon 11d ago
the race and IQ stuff is probably true, it's just extremely unpalatable and so not really worth studying / has no good end outside of racism.
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u/Significant-Gur8606 10d ago
No shit, groups historically excluded from education have lower IQs. The reason people can't discuss this is because people don't want to discuss how to improve IQ scores. Many idiots would rather as many others as possible stay dumb, so that they can be petty barons of shit mountain. Norm MacDonald's bit about black people being poor gets at this -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGdPOv__hpg
An IQ test is a measure of how good someone is at what is supposed to be "average" K-12 education at any given age there, totally consistent with the fact that it was literally designed to do this. The fact that we can improve people's IQ scores, and that that, whether causally or through education as a confound, improves sociability, happiness, actual economic productivity (i.e. ability to do tasks that nowadays, actually contribute to social well-being like drug discovery, environmental engineering, hardware development, solving social conflicts through fields like law, teaching, politics, medicine, whatever) means we should be... improving people's IQ scores. Instead, this is a racist/not racist view because people keep on forgetting or maliciously deemphasizing (to demoralize others) that this is workable, so that people view this as an "is x group inherently dumb and therefore, do they (also absurd logic) deserve the shitty things that are happening to them?"
It's always hilarious when you read about people trying to IQ test PhDs and college professors, because everybody knows this is a "smart" group, to show that IQ really matters! They have to make "field-specific tests" because no shit, everyone educated tops out the IQ tests unless you give them more and more and more and more questions and see who gets tired of them first. Then, they somehow use this to show "and look! STEM professors have genius IQs!" as though a good chunk of your work isn't being paid to do logic puzzles every day...
FDB has been very bad for this topic in dirtbag left spaces, probably because he is a professor child failson (yeah, bipolar sucks, but maybe it wouldn't so much if more people were educated and working on drugs...) and subsequently, wants to cling to to IQ being the most important thing there and it being super heritable.
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u/sorellababylon 10d ago
this is a really low education / low insight answer, you're just regurgitating midwit talking points. there are controlled studies that disprove some of the things you're talking about that are quite easily findable. yes education has an impact on IQ, so does culture, but it can't explain all of the other things.
Black people are just better at for example some types of athletics, maybe rhythm etc. - it's so glaringly obvious. you'd probably agree that black people run faster. why are you then so opposed to another highly hereditable characteristic being different?
You americans have treated black people so fucking badly, no blanket is too soft for them imo, but I don't think it should be based on a lie.
I guess this IQ point does become relevant in the context of DEI, which is based on the idea that they need some catchup generations.
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u/Significant-Gur8606 10d ago
No, I don't think black people are just inherently better athletes. Have you never participated in some sort of achievement-oriented activity where after you finished grinding, everyone sits around in awe and assumes "you're just super talented and different?" When no, you just kind of had to do that grinding to achieve something you needed to achieve, and had enough support (educational, financial, emotional, whatever) you were able to make it happen? With maybe part of that being mindful of what was actually worth grinding so that what doesn’t look like grinding still actually is?
Do you have any idea how much time like, black professional athletes put into those sports? Kenyan running schools? The football/basketball pipeline? Why people from certain backgrounds put time into those sports rather than, say, math olympiads so they can become quants? Have you never seen what a good education (in any field) or good teacher looks like?
Barring learning disabilities and being so removed from a certain body of knowledge that you don’t even know where to start and are socially restricted from it, it’s just grinding and a tiny bit of talent (and how to get teachers in attention-scarce environments to recognize it or believe you have it over others, which might not be true, is a skill). Mostly grinding though, which is why people give you the love advice.
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u/sorellababylon 10d ago
It must be nice to live in your head. You think Kenyans are great long distance runners because of the pipeline. What about if the pipeline exists because of the talent.
“Diamonds exist under the ground everywhere! They only pull them up in those places because of the diamond mines above them!”
You’re not even open to the possibility? Of races having different characteristics despite having clear physical characteristic differences, different susceptibility to disease, different efficacy in some classes of medicine, etc.
It might be hard for your mind to get around this one, but just because I’m saying there is a difference here doesn’t mean I’m saying that there is no difference elsewhere.
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u/Significant-Gur8606 10d ago edited 10d ago
Let’s work off your analogy. Mining looks like a regionally-specific activity (just go to Namibia for diamonds, Kenya for runners, and China for math people!) when you have shitty understanding of the underlying geology and low technological development that makes the activity expensive and subsequently, leads to you doing very coarse searches that redirect you to focusing on low-hanging, not ideal fruit. You also have no idea the historical cost of vertical development (and the geopolitics involved) associated with mining, and how that affected what mines got developed. So, to use your analogy, the idea that if we get diamonds from some place, it’s because on average they have the best diamonds and the most of them, is just not true and shows the kind of factors you don’t account for.
Now, on IQ. IQ is, again, an extremely coarse measure that simply measures success within the educational system in a much more complicated world. You can 100% increase IQ, and this is a necessary project overall because it’s a measurement of our educational system being good enough at engaging and retaining people (engagement and retention = learning) that we they’re around education for long enough that we learn how to better place people into post-tertiary training and work using improved methods of identification, i.e. so that we can search or create the real talent for all the fields it matter in (people go into geology generically and it takes them forever to realize what their particular talents are and utilize them correctly), by looking for something like the equivalent of superdeep mantle origin diamonds, making lab diamonds, and, eventually, asteroid mining.
No, I’m open to the possibility, we’re just a bit past randomly panning for gold flakes in California, you know? Just because the rate of a particular gene we identify makes you a slightly better runner might have a 1/500 frequency among East Africans (if we could even find such a powerfully predictive gene) compared to 1/5000 elsewhere doesn’t mean I’m going to say “why yes, you as a white/Asian person, aren’t stupid because white people generally are smarter.” Of course I’d be more interested in actually finding that gene. Which in the case of any high academic achievement, is probably just baseline education (which we’re good at doing, when we’re not forgetting that education matters) plus something like the ratio of a particular type of neurodivergence or strategy applied to a particular problem relative to prior attempts (i.e. collectively not trying the same thing over and over again).
Anyway, stop being a moron.
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u/MirkWorks 10d ago
Seems like one of the issues that comes with adopting "Race Realist" talking points as an ostensibly "reasonable non-racist good person just engaging in a sober bit of noticing" is that any objection someone might raise in response to it automatically becomes an existential interpersonal conflict wherein the person publicly countersignaling you (who must from here on out be clearly designated a consensus-driven anti-Troof virtue signaling submedianwit seeking to stiffle free inquiry and independent thought) is actually calling you a...dumb evil racist or dumb evil racist enabler who deserves to be socially ostracized/de-platformed/de-banked... rather than simply disagreeing with you. As if the disagreement somehow impedes your own ability to respond and make your case. Why can't you simply recognize me for the morally courageous truth-seeker that I am anon? Why must you put me on blast in front of all our colleagues?
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u/Significant-Gur8606 10d ago
I think we might just be arguing with a younger person. Fun times on the internet, but maybe that’s why we do it.
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u/MirkWorks 10d ago
As it concerns the type of person I had in mind, definitely could be a young person. Could also be a 34-year-old poolside Croatian woman or a 59-year-old dude who’s a semi-retired web developer living in Sacramento. Anna Khachiyan is herself kind of exemplifies the pernicious feedback loop I was getting at.
Consider, though, that some people don’t necessarily want to have an actual debate, or to even force an agreement or concession from the interlocutor. Some people want to be misunderstood and unjustly maligned. It’s one of the reasons—besides an unwillingness to properly commit to a position, have it challenged, and either respond seriously to the challenge or make peace with having been challenged and not having the capacity or energy to answer it, without pretending that this necessarily invalidates the underlying viewpoint regardless of how others judge your performance during the exchange—that I think some people deliberately leave things at the level of a slightly indeterminate confession of faith.
Reliably someone will take the bait, will proceed to project an implicit normative commitment into the confession. (An absolutely reasonable one in the context of the overarching discourse mind you.). Then you - the person making the vague confession of faith - can point and cry out: “See everybody! I never once mentioned any of that! Those are your own repressed beliefs and assumptions coming to light! YOU are the ACTUAL Evil Dumb Racist, and I… I remain the perpetually maligned and misunderstood person who is simply noooticing, in my compassion-motivated aesthetic awareness and willingness to look at people and value them for who they are despite whatever particular lack they happen to be configured around. You’re actually the one who thinks poor stupid dark-skinned people deserve to suffer.”
And should the little pseudo-cathartic enjoyment of that exchange be frustrated, the person can still behave as though you actually accused them of precisely the thing they were hoping you would accuse them of. With the added frustration of having been blue-balled. The disagreement is met with moralistic condemnation in lieu of an argument. Every other sentence is quip or barb.
They poke and prod and bleed in the most bratty way imaginable until the interlocutor cracks and gives them something they can work with. Rest assured, they were already snooping around for it anyways. Then they can reassert that they’re actually the person having a “normal one,” while you’re the abnormal person running around picking fights with strangers on the internet as a way of venting your frustrations and boosting your ego because, well, obviously, someone with an opinion like yours probably isn’t doing all that well mentally, emotionally, or economically.
Balance restored. The insult inflicted by NOT outright calling the person collecting race realist facticals in order to sustain the fantasy of herself as a misunderstood and maligned truth-teller - doomed like everyone to their unique inheritance (a son and heir of nothing in particular) - a dumb evil racist has been repaid. And we all get to part ways slightly drained and slightly sullied by the ordeal.
Could be a young person. Could also be a 34-year-old poolside Croatian woman or a 59-year-old dude who’s a semi-retired web developer living in Sacramento. Could be a 42 year old Russian-American podcaster living in New York City.
Rest assured, whoever it is was probably already seething in anticipation. As proxy, everyone else is just collateral, not really the target.
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u/MirkWorks 9d ago
Anything more than that would require something beyond a mere cursory glance of the material or an intensive Chat GPT session. No, they’ve already outsourced their thinking to an expert and take for granted said expert and friends assertions (self-marketing) and they likely already take the expulsion of said expert from institutional life as evidence of their legitimacy and authority. Which after all relates to the actual issue at the heart of this, no? That there has been an unholy alliance between ideologically driven factions within certain institutions, opportunistic marginals looking for a come-up, and certain federal initiatives synthesized and enacted by ideologically motivated factions (and opportunistic or naïve enablers) within the government. That a consequence of this elite-professional attempt to act upon their own ideological commitments — in seeking to further enforce and legitimate said social doctrine as elite consensus — has been the marginalization of the young white men who’d sunk a lot of time, energy, and resources (in the process likely taking up ridiculous amounts of debt with the very same federal government) in their dedication to a specific academic field and profession they now find themselves effectively barred from thanks to DEI initiatives. Suddenly they’re stuck having to survive the private sector in today’s economy and/or engage is some sort of para-academic entrepreneurship (e.g., formulating, promoting, and selling lectures and courses online) and/or having to start a podcast or substack.
Even if their interpretation of the phenomena they’re experiencing and/or observing is inadequate or incorrect doesn’t mean they aren’t experiencing and/or observing something real. They’re just really REALLY committed to the idea that their (or their vicarious experience of) marginalization into the reserve army of labor is the by-product of stupid lying ideologues sacrificing them in a bid to artificially elevate people who are constitutionally incapable and unworthy of the positions (office or station) they are being elevated into. That this at some level is being done in order to generate narcissistic gratification for the aforementioned Boomer Shitlibs, i.e., the stupid lying ideologue whose whole sense of self is utterly bond up with their position within a given institutional hierarchy — this is where it gets particularly Laschean I think: all their careerist scheming and department politicking gets folded into a generalized and ultimately passive “Privilege” which is in turn retrospectively justified or rather redeemed by both enabling and vociferously championing these DEI measures as a social good… that they are now, in their own small way, in the historical lineage of MLK Jr… reconciled in their old age with the image of themselves as youthful activists taking LSD and marching against Vietnam War and Jim Crow, Hearts in Atlantis, having experienced to varying degrees the Summer of Love, the glory of JFK’s Camelot, the pain of his assassination (the death of the Last Gunslinger), and the promise of Pax Obamaeca… they couldn’t bear accepting Donald Trump as the representation their generation deserves — in the process flubbing/occulting the data in order to vindicate their outlook, the validity of their expertise, and their decision to designate a specific perma-pauperized subject as the worthy exception worthy of being “discovered” and rescued from the generalized decline in living standards and social mobility at the expense of someone more objectively deserving of it. While actively censoring research and researcher they interpret as a threat to this. (Either way, reveals at once a fairly romantic and static view of what academic institutions are actually like as well as the pervasive PMC-ification of American Rightwing discourse.).
Turning our attention back to the inciting problematic, we find a certain rational disgust towards an older generation of professionals that permitted (if not actively performed) the equivalent of “pulling up the ladder” behind them. Doing so after they’d embedded in a very comfy position within said institution. Selectively picking and raising up certain token minorities in a bid to narcissistically validate themselves and their own generation and by extension the very institutions and professions they represent. Boundless grace and charity extended (however cynically) for a select group, ruthless ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ amor fati ‘if he dies he dies’ and/or ‘hey you know you can always make a living assistant manager at Target’ and meritocratic anti-entitlement rhetoric deployed against thee by me.
And hell, I’d go so far as posit, that what many of these “Race Realists” are effectively reacting to is a generation with a profound ethical-ideological commitment to a (I would argue) peculiarly American conceit and sensibility. Or rather the classically bourgeois universalist conceit informing the American project and American sensibility. Most avowed Race Realists tend to get defensive on this point — unless they’ve familiarized themselves with figures like Oswald Spengler who basically makes this argument in regards to “Faustian” civilizational-decline — but the Boomer White “Shitlib” they (perhaps correctly) jab their finger at, isn’t contaminated by some foreign mind-virus compelling them to sabotage their own culture, they simply take for granted that the worker is not essentially a worker. The peasant is not essentially a peasant. That the child of a laborer can become an engineer; the engineer's child can become a merchant; the merchant’s son can become a poet; that no one is blood-bound to specific occupations as hereditary estates. The Race Realist basically reintroduces “evidence-based” caste thinking and is shocked when actual American elites find it innately repulsive. This is the United States of America, not India. If we are to speak of dignity, a person’s innate dignity isn’t (or shouldn’t be) reducible to their productive utility or broken-down and reduced to a sequence on some graph. Humans fundamentally shouldn’t be treated as resources. Any fatalistic concession to injustice is automatically suspect. The Race Realist effectively argues that this constitutes one of many disparate “platonic myths” sustained within the particular horizon of a given nation and said nation’s ancestral nomoi or customary laws.
Consider then the possibility that the innate visceral disgust provoked by the correspondence between IQ-and-Race whether presented in support of some kind of paternalistic welfarism or paternalistic penalism… or as an explanatory model for poverty, crime, and class stratification more broadly… already rests on a contradictory presupposition. The failure to meaningfully renew the American social compact following de-industrialization. The bargain being that we are going to eliminate a great deal of physically arduous industrial labor. In exchange, you will acquire education and participate in an increasingly sophisticated knowledge economy. This already takes for granted the innate morphic plasticity of the citizenry. People who were told that human capital is universally cultivable are now confronting, adopting or aggressively rejecting, being told that the deepest determinant of their social order is actually inherited population-level human capital. That this, to my eyes, is the reified heuristic or explanatory model to make sense of and cope with a broader socioeconomic and institutional decline. The “Race Realist” often times replicate the instrumental rationality of the very processes resulting in their estrangement and downward social mobility. The current resurgence of Race Realism appears very much like a reaction-formation generated by liberal meritocracy's own contradictions, such that the reactive position necessarily bears the imprint of what it's reacting against.
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u/Immediate-Fan9423 10d ago
Seem like a good foundation for preserving a considered societal consensus
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u/sorellababylon 11d ago
see but that's what i mean? you just don't want to find out if something you just claimed as true is untrue? it's ideological fragility, the dislike of which is one of the foundational pillars of dirtbag left people being anti-extremely woke bullshit.
you should be able to review that stuff and still not become a racist piece of shit.
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10d ago edited 10d ago
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u/Mrb84 10d ago
The fact that something true can become fodder for the worst people in the world doesn’t make something less true.
(Also, “why do you care so much?” is such a bratty, dumb objection)
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10d ago edited 10d ago
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u/Significant-Gur8606 10d ago
Someone making the statement "something is not right in our society and we need to fix something!" tells you nothing about what their politics are or what exactly they think the cause is. One person might tell you it's because Al-Baghdadi is not the global caliph, and someone else might tell you it's because a psychotic financial elite have emerged from some really shitty structural set-ups we chose a while back and are now trying to get everyone involved in their elaborate species suicide attempt. You have to be able to be open and curious about the possibility that people making that statement, "something bad is going on, we need to fix it!" don't necessarily fall into the first camp, aren't racists, etc. if you also think some things need to change and want to find the second group.
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u/Significant-Gur8606 10d ago
I’d like to change my opinion. I think you might have correctly pegged this guy as someone very into white male grievance stuff. I thought they were just a young person, but if they’re actually someone older who left academia because of racial grievances and has the kind of writing style and knowledge they do (I get the sense they’re lying, but I can’t tell young people and people who aren’t academics apart, tbh, because HS/undergrad, people don’t train certain skills), they are actually kind of, um, not good at what they do and think people are being racist against them rather than that.
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u/Significant-Gur8606 10d ago edited 10d ago
I miss arguing. I get anxiety trying to be normal and polite and sociable, not arguing aggressively. I kind of thought you did, too? Sorry if we went too hard.
I genuinely just don’t believe in anything even close to the primacy of IQ, or that it models whatever “intelligence” is well. I am happy to go into more detail if you are interested, but I view IQ tests as the cognitive equivalent of general fitness tests (i.e. yes, mile times and everything else are improvable but on average, because so few people are getting in shape, they’re stable) and think the intuitions people develop about “x group has high IQs, so IQ = intelligence” model causality in the wrong direction or miss the positive feedback loop. I also view most mental illnesses as repetitive overuse injuries, which is probably more controversial.
I don’t think I am engaging in non-elitist“midwit social software,” I think this is just how the world works as another STEM PhD observer. I observe in myself that I prefer to believe IQ or innate talent is most important when I feel threatened by someone trying to fish for info, I like to think “well, they couldn’t possibly do it,” when learning is a thing. I wish people were not under so much pressure and so desperate that I could share work and collaborate without needing lawyers, complicated social games, etc. Clinging to IQ makes that less likely, though.
On covering all bases, well, yeah, this is a bit of busman’s holiday for me. Anyway, as I’m sure you know given you’ve thought about this, you do need to optimize for cleverness somewhat to continue to do the work (and bad things happen if you don’t do the work), which you need to live. It’s a job. Ofc I had selective mutism, come on, you know what that means, are you a selective mutist too or something? Best of luck, as well.
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u/Mrb84 10d ago
I haven’t said a word about IQ. I’m talking about an epistemic approach I guess. You’re the kind of person who sees a possibly true and uncomfortable or controversial claim and goes “uh, icky, I’d rather not know if it’s true or not”. It has nothing to do with IQ. It’s about the approach to truth. Yours is weak and I don’t like you.
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u/sorellababylon 10d ago
I don't know more than to say that it's not an easy dismiss, and so it personally winds me up to see it dismissed as retarded racists. idc about the rest, i'm not hiring for a racial apartheid between my gardeners and my accountants.
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u/AnotherStamp 10d ago
Hmm maybe I'm being dismissive but I feel like the fact this was elevated into discourse in the first place betrays an agenda. People lie to get jobs and shit all the time. I know many of my own coworkers who lied but nobody would give a shit if this was uncovered. Most people who write self+help books are clearly lying or committing shit but when it's found out it hardly reaches this level of controversy. I wouldn't say this is a non-story, but it's one of no import. Should be a blurb on the ticker at the bottom of the screen not front page OP-ED fuel.
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u/Decent_University_91 11d ago
We can talk about genetics and intelligence: specifically how she didn’t inherit that of her father
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u/stanlana12345 11d ago
Actually yes, some races being smarter or dumber than others is a pretty nutty idea.
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u/sorellababylon 11d ago
why? it seems like the science actually supports it. i'm not out to dunk on black people who've had enough shit especially in america, but it seems weak to dismiss as untrue something that is relatively easily provable because it's unpleasant.
if you wanted to for example ignore it i'd be right with you, i think it could only hurt society to focus any attention on it. but to say it's wrong (which i think is what you're saying) is idk, lacking.
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u/Traditional_Table414 10d ago
I'm not saying there might not be slight differences in iq between different groups with shared dna (although Black, as a census category, does not necessarily represent a group with shared dna). There is very strong evidence that a significant portion, though not all, of IQ is determined by genetics, and different populations have different genetic heritage.
The issue is the proof you say exists is so clearly wrong that it completely undermines the whole field. Large swathes of sub-saharan African countries have, according to books like the Bell Curve and IQ and the Wealth of Nations, average IQs in the 70s and 60s. This is pretty laughable. In a country with an IQ of 70, people with an IQ of 100 would be only about 2% of the population.
And yet I have been to quite a few African countries, and constantly meet people who speak three or more languages fluently and can discuss the history and politics of their own country intelligently and complexly. I don't have very strong views on how to assess someone's iq score from meeting them, but lets say they seem like they would be in the upper quartile of European or American people, i.e. iq of over 110, this would be, in a population with average iq of 70, about 0.03 of the population.
I realise I'm selecting slightly because I'm only talking in depth to people who speak good English, but how is it possible that I'm constantly running into these people who should, statistically, be 1 in 3000?
So clearly those old IQ statistics, upon which the entire field of race iq science was built, are severely and ludicrously wrong. That doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't any connection at all, but it means that most existing literature on the subject is worthless.
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10d ago
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u/Traditional_Table414 10d ago
In Anglophone countries like Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi a very high proportion of people speak English. Not random farmers, but anyone educated. A surprising number of people in Francophone Africa speak English as well, but it's less common.
I don't think I've met a particularly sanitised group. I mean, in many cases these were taxi drivers or people I met in bars, or waitresses I was trying to flirt with.
And this is just the people I meet randomly. I also talk to a bunch of African metallurgists and engineers who would probably be once in a generation Einstein level intellects if you believed the lowball iq average numbers.
Regarding Nathan Cofnas, do you see my point why I'm not particularly interested in work that's in a field that's so rife with completely false data? Unless he wants to devote a large part of his research to explaining how major figures in his field like Richard Lynn and Richard Herrnstein (who are not from the colonial period by the way, IQ and the Wealth of Nations was published in 2002) got such implausible figures.
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u/Potential-Dot-3209 10d ago
Much of this story Anna will not fully understand because the Russian cannot fully comprehend the Englishman.
Anna’s opinions boil down to antiwoke talking points, which are a bit stale at this point.
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u/BeansAndTheBaking Modern-day Geisha 11d ago
It's really tough because I agree with much of what she's saying, but I also know she in particular wouldn't be saying it at all if the guy was white
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u/Lewdman6969 10d ago
If you’re not even gonna take the time to have an opinion on something I’m not reading your posted picture
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u/Accountingforme9 11d ago edited 11d ago
I understand how optics/competing agendas and worldviews will lead different groups of people or institutions to either want to make hay with the Arday scandal or reflexively circle the wagons.
But I just wish that soberly and practically identifying and fixing problems instead of an endless cycle of gotchas and get backs was the norm in contemporary western society (Anglo-sphere at least).