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They asked for an honest conversation on race, right? Enter this week’s guest Charles Murray, author most recently of Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. He and guys jostle on this most sensitive of subjects, but do so with the kind of generosity you can only find on Ricochet (We let things be too chummy around here!) Rob, Peter and James also get into the G7 and a rudderless Biden on the world stage, along with Jon Stewart on Stephen Colbert’s stage. They even do their best to find some optimism, but we may need our friends at Ricochet to cheer them up in the comments!
Music from this week’s podcast: Ball of Confusion by The Temptations
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What do we do with the left end of the bell curve? These are people that certainly struggle in modern society as constituted. Both the left, who assert oppression, and the libertarian right, who assert laziness, pretend the left side of the bell curve doesn’t exist. Most people posting on this forum probably don’t have meaningful relationships with sub-90 IQ people. Maybe you don’t even really interact substantively with anyone with an IQ below 100. Half of the population has an IQ below 100 (by definition). People on the right end of the bell curve have a poor feel for the true range of IQ differences. How many of the routine actions necessary for middle class life in America, like filing taxes or securing a mortgage, are simply beyond the ability of some substantial percentage of the population? Some form of traditionalism offers these people the best opportunity to live productive, dignified, and happy lives. But such an approach is anathema to high IQ novelty seekers. Which most of us here are.
Those are certainly two of the choices we have. There’s a third: that, whatever impact intelligence has on success, and whatever impact some people’s personal opinions about race may have on success, the overwhelmingly dominant factor in success is the choices the individual makes, and it is within the ability of all normal people to make much better choices than are being made by our most disadvantaged citizens. So we should work to teach and equip our most vulnerable to make better choices.
That probably speaks more to the pathologies of the street than to the disparities of the board room, though the first undoubtedly contributes at least somewhat to the latter. It’s unfortunate that both the CRT and IQ theses probably have more to do with performance at the top than with dysfunction at the bottom, yet our greatest need is to understand and correct the dysfunction.
As others have said here, the real issue is fixing a broken subculture.
I was watching a movie recently (Highlander, I think it was) on one or another streaming service. There was an ad for some clothing outfit called GOAT. The ad featured a sullen young black man doing his best to look cool and ominous and ghetto and defiant and all of that, and as I watched it I thought that this is what’s wrong. The guy was intended to project a kind of strength and independence that might work in the hood but that fails in the world of normal, successful people. It’s a shell formed by negative experience and it radiates resentment and banked hostility. It’s the wrong model of strength, one built on implied anger rather than independence, resolve, and duty.
And, frankly, it looks weak.
There’s a lot broken in the popular urban subculture, and we don’t need to change IQ to fix it. We sure don’t need CRT to fix it, because racism isn’t the problem.
Actually they probably do — or, if they use machines, they have to be constantly broken down and cleaned.
I find I addressed the issue of technological unemployment on an earlier occasion:
[Byron] Reese points out that, in spite of the enormous technological changes over the past 250 years, the unemployment rate in the United States has remained between 4% and 10%.* That if you graph out unemployment for that period, you can’t even see a blip where, say, the assembly line was introduced, or steam power came in.
Reese estimates that the half-life of a job is 50 years; that is, every 50 years, half of the jobs disappear — yet unemployment doesn’t go up. …
*With the exception of the Great Depression, which was not technological unemployment but bad policy.
As activities are automated, they tend to fade into the background, economically. Imagine a forecaster in 1791 predicting what the labor market would look like in 2021: a vast army of beggars camped at the gates of wealthy landowners. After all, when the economy goes from, say, 92% farmers to 2% farmers, what will happen to that “unemployed” 90%?
Obviously that’s not what really happened. People left the farms all right, but to do other things.
In recent years, for example, we have seen the vast expansion of healthcare, from operating on brains to helping old people get out of bed. The secret sauce of employment is not intelligence but conscientiousness.
Many years ago I had a professor (the first black hired by that particular school, incidentally) who had been a naval officer in the Korean War. He used to joke that naval systems were designed by geniuses to be operated by idiots.
That’s how societies should be designed.
He may have been thinking of the experience of California, after a referendum made it harder to discriminate by race in college admissions.
Previously the academic careers — and future career plans — of minorities were being routinely wrecked, when students with very respectable 500s and 600s on their SATs were dumped into classrooms where the white and Asian students had 700s and 750s, just to make the university’s minority numbers look better.
Look better temporarily, that is, until the minorities flunked out …
IQ is defined as a normalized measure of general intelligence. Can you measure IQ? Poorly. Is a single metric a good measure of general intelligence? In some situations.
See comments above.
The g or general intelligence factor is something that psychometricians discovered rather than invented. Give people a simple response time test, like “press the button when the light goes on“, and there is no correlation with IQ. But as you make it more complicated, the more highly it correlates with IQ.
Remarkably, vocabulary tests also correlate highly with IQ. People with large vocabularies tend to do well on non-verbal tests!
The same. Both stem from exactly the same philosophical and ideologic perspective. They are part and parcel of the same worldview. A LeComptean/Marxist/Scientific positivism/Mechanical deterministic view that minimizes the human and leads the elite to think they can engineer a “just” and “progressive” society. That Humans are accidents of mindless evolution. That “anything goes”. Read the history of Eugenics, and the forced sterilization (and worse) of the “unfit” (read, “low IQ” individuals). The only thing that changes, perhaps, is who is in charge. All oppression. All “supremacy” of one sort or another. All tribalist. All “scientific”. They are both direct expressions of the “Enlightenment”.
A person’s performance on any one type of cognitive task tends to track with that person’s performance on other cognitive tasks. The g factor (general intelligence) is a construct that reflects these positive correlations among different cognitive tasks. IQ is an (imperfect) method to measure the g factor. It gives a number based on a person’s performance on cognitive tests relative to large numbers of other test takers. IQ tests are structured to indicate g by scoring performance across a statistically weighted variety of cognitive abilities. IQ testing is designed to be reproducible for a person and scoring is calculated to be consistent over time. Psychometricians have been doing this for a century and the methods have been extensively validated. There is a large inertial mass of literature detailing a variety of human traits and social outcomes associated with IQ.
IQ has limitations but is important for couple of reasons. It generates a number that experts can use for analysis and to make comparisons and establish correlations. It also serves as a link between certain social outcomes and some biologic phenomenon based in physical reality.
Small differences in IQ between individuals are not important, but differences between defined groups of people are consequential, and large differences between individuals will be noticeable.
An analogy might be 40 yard dash times. This generates a number which does not correspond linearly to how good a football player an athlete might be. But there are all manner of complex and useful associations that coaches and bookies are definitely interested in.
That’s the subject I bring up in terms of things like where people who can’t really do much in this age of technology, are nevertheless expected to have some employment to pay their way. And it may actually involve a lot more people than those with sub-90 IQ.
The past year may have been somewhat illustrative of this too: lots of restaurants etc shut down, but nobody starves because they can’t eat at a restaurant. In simplest terms, restaurants aren’t NECESSARY, and to a degree they could be said to just provide make-work employment for people who aren’t capable of doing much more than carrying plates around etc.
The problem with just asserting individualism is that the group differences exist. People can see them, and thanks to the Enlightenment, you can’t just hide them behind superstition and taboo. And more and more we have recorded data that shows these group differences aren’t just uninformed stereotypes. However, the biggest reason we can’t ignore them is that the CRT people are throwing them in our faces. They have a malicious explanation for the group differences. Their model asserts that I am evil and must be crushed. Not just me, but all of us. What is the counter explanation? The middle ground has been ripped up by the other side. We can’t just ignore the reality anymore. We can’t just live in a happier fiction.
I’ve always thought that having 2 or 3 people to get the “work” of one, wasn’t a great deal. Such as, having another person around 24/7 to help an old person, or translate/interpret for a deaf or blind person, etc. Maybe that’s another example of a kind of make-work, as mentioned in my previous post. Wouldn’t it be smarter to have the “extra” person doing something more useful, rather than just being in effect someone else’s servant? Again, unless they just aren’t capable of doing anything more advanced on their own, in which case it’s the make-work that can be afforded by a properous society so that everyone has “a job” no matter how pointless it may be. And no matter how easily the same tasks might be automated.
Too often these days, the idiots demand to be included in the designing etc.
And too often, the supposed “geniuses” were also idiots to start with.
Just as often, the designers had high I.Q. but refused to use it to understand reality. That is as big a problem as low I.Q.
Well, the smart people need to test their designs with stupid people, and then be smart enough to recognize when they need to change things to accommodate those who will actually be using them.
Helping take care of the old and infirm is not what most people mean by the term, “make work”.
Also, I’m not sure most old people would prefer to be cared for by robots or replicants, on the future date when such things become available.
Have you met millennials? Robots would definitely be better.
But there remains the issue that, even if it’s not “make-work,” it’s still work for those who aren’t qualified to do anything more complex, or more technological, etc.
It’s kinda neat. Here’s Wikipedia:
Human chromosome 2 is a result of an end-to-end fusion of two ancestral chromosomes. … The closest human relative, the chimpanzee, has nearly identical DNA sequences to human chromosome 2, but they are found in two separate chromosomes. The same is true of the more distant gorilla and orangutan.
Similarly, you can buy The Lord of the Rings in three volumes or in one, getting the same text either way.
Most such chromosomal rearrangements result in reduced fertility and eventual elimination, but c23 lucked out — or had a selective advantage over c24.
And I think – I hope – we don’t want this kind of make-work just so “everyone has a job.”
Yes. But the telomeres, the ends of the chromosome, are so structured as to prevent end-to-end joining of chromosomes. That is an event that has not been seen in any other organism. Also, simultaneously, the centromere of one set of the joined chromosomes had to cease functioning as a centromere, otherwise Chiasmic chaos would result, and the change would not be viable. Further, the change would have to have occurred in two individuals of opposite sex at the same time in the same location, to allow the possibility of mating between those individuals, to allow perpetuation of the chromosomal change. The concatenation of events to produce this change is so remote as to be virtually impossible. But it happened. Something fishy is going on. This is why David Gelernter says that Darwinian evolution, and what we know about genetics and probabilities means that something far more than random mutation and natural selection are required to explain the biome that we see around us, and in us. What might that something be? One starts to get into a quantum realm where events are influenced by strange behavior of quantum systems. This has hardly dented the awareness of biologists, let alone anyone else. Lucked out? Such luck is virtually impossible. The probabilities against it are astronomical. Again, see the book, Noesis, the book, available on Ricochet.Noesis, the book
“Labor is more scarce than material factors of production. We are not dealing at this point with the problem of optimum population. We are dealing only with the fact that there are material factors of production which remain unused because the labor required is needed for the satisfaction of more urgent needs. In our world there is no abundance, but a shortage of manpower, and there are unused material factors of production, i.e, land, mineral deposits, and even plants and equipment.
“This state of affairs could be changed by such an increase in population figures that all material factors required for the production of the foodstuffs indispensable—in the strict meaning of the word—for the preservation of human life are fully exploited. But as long as this is not the case, it cannot be changed by any improvement in technological methods of production. The substitution of more efficient methods of production for less efficient ones does not render labor abundant, provided there are still material factors available whose utilization can increase human well-being. On the contrary, it increases output and thereby the quantity of consumers’ goods. “Labor-saving” devices increase supply. They do not bring about “technological unemployment.”
“Every product is the result of the employment both of labor and of material factors. Man economizes both labor and material factors.”
—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
I’m guessing you’re not a big tipper.
My apologies. Here’s a clearer account than mine:
Initially, this event would produce an individual with 47 chromosomes, where two different chromosomes get stuck together. Contrary to what is often assumed, this individual would be fertile and able to interbreed with the others in his or her population (who continue to have 48 chromosomes). In a small population, over time, two relatives who both have one copy of the fusion chromosome may mate and produce some progeny with two copies of the fused chromosome, or the first individuals with 46 chromosomes. … While not overly likely, this type of event is not especially rare in mammals, and we have observed this sort of thing happening within recorded human history in other species. Some mammalian species even maintain distinct populations in the wild with differing chromosome numbers due to fusions, and these populations retain the ability to interbreed.
https://biologos.org/articles/denisovans-humans-and-the-chromosome-2-fusion
Emphases mine.
P.S.: On this subject, David Gelernter is a fringe crank.
@taras So where are all those Humans with 47 chromosomes? Or Denisovans? Or Neanderthals? The comments in the link you provide do not address the direct end to end joining of two different chromosomes as appears to have occurred in Humans. Fusion of chromosomes occurs at sites other than the telomere ends. So it is definitely NOT the case that such events have been observed. The chromosome fusions that are seen are at locations other than direct telomere end to telomere end joining, with the concomitant conversion of the centromere site to not function as a centromere. None of the intermediates postulated by this commentator as part of the process of conversion to 23 Cs have ever been seen in humans.
Calling David Gelernter a fringe crank on any topic is treading on thin ice.