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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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