The Supreme Court endorsed racial preferences a few years ago, endorsing the popular belief that ethnic diversity stimulates intellectual life.
Similarly, back in 2004, The Economist opined:
"Even if there were a stark choice between diversity and social solidarity, it is not clear that the latter would be better. In 1856 Walter Bagehot, deprived of the diversity which the past century and a half has brought, railed against his tight-knit society, which he thought stifled excitement and innovative thinking. “You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius,” he wrote, “but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbour.”
Print journalists are always denouncing bloggers for posting without taking time to think, but do they bother doing reality checks themselves?
To test The Economist's theory, let's make up a list of British thinkers active in 1856:
Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, John Stuart Mill, Florence Nightingale, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Benjamin Disraeli, Francis Galton, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Thomas Henry Huxley, William Makepeace Thackeray, Richard Burton, Anthony Trollope, Michael Faraday, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot…
In this company, even Walter Bagehot himself, an outstanding public intellectual and journalist, seems a little outclassed.
I suspect that it's more likely that ethnic diversity stifles innovative thinking by making political correctness more mandatory to keep the peace.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
---"making political correctness more mandatory to keep the peace"
ReplyDeleteThis is so true, it should be printed on the masthead of the NYT instead of "all the news thats fit....".
It could also be engraved in the stone faces of camupuses'humanities buildings, because it is more-or-less their mission statement (was my experience anyway).
The mindset of The Economist seems increasingly stuck in the past, ca 1996, when it was all Globalisation and The End of History. Their articles seem increasingly divorced from the ever-darker reality of these past six years.
ReplyDeleteThis seems like a topic that resists easy generalizations. Ethnically homogenous societies that produced great thinkers and culture certainly exist - Japan over the last 5-6 centuries. But you can make a case that ethnically diverse societies have been more creative, at least as long as one dominant ethnic group is clearly in charge and the other groups more or less aspire to imitate the ruling group - 19th - 20th century Russian empire, 18th-mid 20th century USA, the early Roman Empire, etc. Also the degree of ethnic diversity has to be taken into account - Great Britain in 1850 was not homogenous - it was an empire. In addition to the cultural "spice" from exposure to India and other overseas domains, the home islands were not monocultural. In those days Irish were certainly considered a different ethnic group from the anglo-saxon ruling group. There were also Welsh and Scots who had very different cultural traditions and outlooks than Sussex men.
ReplyDeleteOne difficulty of course is that intellectual creativity requires a developed cultural setting, while "diversity" and "tolerance" mean that no particular culture can be treated as the standard (except I suppose therapeutic, commercial and bureaucratic culture, which seem too crude to produce much of real interest).
ReplyDeleteWasn't it Nietzsche who banged on about how diversity aided creativity?
ReplyDeleteAnyway the locus classicus must be Harry Lime's lines in The Third Man:
Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
The validity of this depends on the relative skills and interests of the ethnics involved and how they relate to the task at hand.
ReplyDeleteDepending on how you define "thinking", a case could be reasonably made for society as a whole benefiting from diversity wherein each group can contribute in areas where they excel: science, art, music, sport, etc. Specialization is the source of both individual and net social wealth to paraphrase Adam Smith.
Unstated is the real problem each group also brings associated tendencies that harm society.
Another problem arises when PC-types generalize this to mean ethnic diversity, regardless of underlying strengths and interests, must be good in every situation.
Forcing unqualified people onto scientific research teams or athletic teams largely because of color creates dysfunctional teams, resentment and stifles innovation. In these cases, such individuals can easily become negative contributors.
In highly competitive fields at the elite levels this becomes clearer which is why such PC-dogma does not reign there. This is especially true where objective standards can quantify achievement in areas like noble prize winners, pro sports and Wall Street. Conversely, in less mission-critical social endeavors free of quantitative standards like government administration, public education and liberal arts research, PC-dogma can run unchecked.
Ken
I think there is a middle ground. The Andamanese on North Sentinel Island aren't too innovative.
ReplyDeleteYou need to be open enough to accept beneficial ideas from around the world, but closed enough to not let in detrimental ideas... or people. But these judgements are hard to make, and unintended effects will always occur.
An interesting theory that I have heard advanced (by well-known historian Gordon Wood, although I don't if it is original with him) is that cultures that are "outsiders" within the dominant culture, but not completely disconnected from it, often produce the best thinkers. Where were most of the best minds in the 18th-century British Empire? Scotland (Smith, Watt, Hume), American (Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, although the last two in particular did their most important work after independence), and to some extent Ireland (Burke, Goldsmith; the Catholic Irish were too downtrodden to make much of an impact, especially since they were Gaelic-speaking). Another example is how many of the best novelists in the twentieth-century U.S. were Southern or Jewish.
ReplyDeletei'm not too convinced of this. brazil is perhaps the most diverse nation on earth and very little has come from there.
ReplyDeletealso note in brazil they had to make serious laws against noticing out loud that everybody was a different race.
that's a 186 million person strike against this idea.
The Supreme Court endorsed racial preferences because a lack of tokens in elite schools cripples the ability of those who attend elite schools (our future leaders), or are on the faculty of elite schools (our 'public intellectuals'), to accuse others of being racist.
ReplyDeleteWow, Diversity=Innovation...So how did poor tiny homogeneous Florence, Athens, and Edinburgh produce: socrates, plato, polyclitus, fidius, da vinci, botecelli, michaneglo, donatello, burns, scott, adams, ...well you get the picture.
ReplyDeleteLet's use Liverpool in the early 1960s as an example of creativity: you could buy all the records you wanted of American black musicians (openess), but there weren't any American black musicians in town to monopolize the music jobs (opportunity). So, local English kids were needed to play American music in the dance halls, and they started to bring their own spin to it.
ReplyDeleteIn contrast, music has gotten bogged down in a racial caste system in the last two decades, which is a big reason why it's gotten boring. For example, when rap first came out, white bands like the Clash, Blondie, and Talking Heads did a few rap songs and nobody minded. But after awhile, that kind of crossover became unfashionable. Nowadays, you have to be as good as Eminem for whites to do hip-hop. Similarly, blacks have lost all interest in the electric guitar. On "Live at the Apollo" the other night, a black guy came out carrying an electric guitar and got booed off the stage. So, there's lots of diversity, but little cross-fertilization.
PC is not about knowing other cultures. It's about the yawning cultural void of Americans who have terrifiedly retreated to suburban enclaves since the 1950's.
ReplyDeleteBad faith PC dogma is the result of incredibly racially stratified higher education and upper-middle classes of the US. "Everybody is all the same" is the mantra of people who've never meaningfully dealt with other ethnic groups.
Any honest and curious person who deals with other cultures knows that people are different. The upper class Victorians like Darwin (who traveled to South America), Francis Burton (who traveled throughout Africa), Byron, and many others wrote "un-PC" things because they actually gave a damn about other people. All those folk Steve lists were men confident enough to walk among other religions and races. Not the token mahogany or caramel or copper face in an Ivy yearbook, but the real authentic dealon their own turf. There's a big difference between respectful acknowledgement and handling of differences and the yawning void of PC ignorance.
steve, the music in britain example is just the tip of the iceberg. in truth, whites trapped in white nations and forced to interact strictly with other whites produced so much dominant culture that white culture has largely become the background culture of the entire planet, hence leading to the idea that whites are "boring".
ReplyDeletepeople don't even realize that cars and planes are a white thing. basketball and baseball are a white thing. time zones are a white thing.
playing a tune in a major key on a piano or guitar is a white thing.
people seem to not realize this, and make fun of the idea of having a white verion of "black entertainment television".
"Oh, what will they show, ice hockey and rodeo and Jeff Foxworthy?"
you can't even have BET without the worldwide proliferation of television, another white thing that is so dominant it has become de-racinated and not generally associated with the people that created it.
the problem for europeans is, perhaps, they are too innovative, and the culture they develop is so strong it stops being associated with them.
"the problem for europeans is, perhaps, they are too innovative, and the culture they develop is so strong it stops being associated with them."
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely right — white culture and inventiveness have created a world where the burden of gratitude is so great that the rest of the world cannot bear it. So we have this absurd pretense that white culture is no culture at all.
When the burden of gratitude become too great you end up with — ingratitude on a massive scale.
I don't know about the Beatles example - what about the original Southern white rockers (Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, etc.) who lived in the same general area as their black equivalents (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc.) and each group fed off the other? Not that I don't agree with your basic point (obviously the more important examples of places like Athens and Florence reinforce it), but I think rock and roll is actually an example of groups living alongside each other producing a new art form.
ReplyDelete"An interesting theory that I have heard advanced (by well-known historian Gordon Wood, although I don't if it is original with him) is that cultures that are "outsiders" within the dominant culture, but not completely disconnected from it, often produce the best thinkers. Where were most of the best minds in the 18th-century British Empire? Scotland (Smith, Watt, Hume), American (Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, although the last two in particular did their most important work after independence), and to some extent Ireland (Burke, Goldsmith; the Catholic Irish were too downtrodden to make much of an impact, especially since they were Gaelic-speaking). Another example is how many of the best novelists in the twentieth-century U.S. were Southern or Jewish."
ReplyDeleteTo add on to that post, Stalin was Georgian and Napoleon grew up an Italian speaker on Corsica. It's been suggested that a nation's greatest leaders are those who are from the nation but not really of it.
I agree w/James. Rock music is a hybrid of southern white & black music. Yeah, PC dictates that we focus on the black component, so object to that: not the facts.
ReplyDelete"Let's use Liverpool in the early 1960s as an example of creativity: ...So, local English kids were needed to play American music in the dance halls, and they started to bring their own spin to it."
Those local "English" kids were of Irish origin, mostly.
McCartney: Irish, both sides
Lennon: Irish father
Harrison: Irish both sides
Starkey: the only 100% Limey
Actually the issue of the ethnic diversity or homogeneity of Classical Athens is an interesting question. It is not entirely obvious just what admixture there was there, nor where the mathematical and philosophical genius was coming from: Dorians, Hittites, Phoenecians? Or possibly further afield. The classical Athenians certainly worried among themselves just how related they were to the Achaians who fought the Trojan war (they shared a language, but not an alphabet!) One thing seems pretty certain is that the current Greeks have only a quite distant relationship to the ancient Greeks—they are in no real sense the inheritors of the classical Greek tradition, and the national IQ is around 80, from memory.
ReplyDeleteBut on the general point Steve is unassailable (or should that be unasSailerable): whether ethnic diversity is a good thing depends entirely on the ethnoi that are diversed. Mostly it will be a very bad thing, as it is currently in Britain, France, Holland and most places in Europe.
There's some ugly overlap of PC, identity politics and diversity that has bad effects. But can you really look at modern US and Europe and say we're not innovating? I mean, there are plenty of things we're screwing up, but at least in science and technology, it's hard to complain about the rate of progress.
ReplyDeleteIn the last 50 years or so we saw libertarian economics go from completely out of fashion to pretty much dominant (with challenges around the edges), so this doesn't look like people able to innovate only in their labs. And in that time, for good and ill, we've seen pretty big social changes--good things like getting rid of racial and sex discrimination, bad things like massively more single moms and racial quotas for education and hiring.
Is lack of innovation a big problem here?
Jody, it's not entirely accurate to say that nothing has come from Brazil. Just to mention a few things off the top of my head: the unique use of sculpture and semi-precious stones in the jewelry of H. Stern, the commuter jets of Embraer, Samba, Bossa Nova, the architecture of Oscar Neimeyer; Brazilian Ju-Jitsu, sugar cane-based ethanol and flex-fuel cars (Brazil is energy-independent thanks to these innovations), the great movie City of God, churascaria, the city planning of Jamie Lerner in Curitiba.
ReplyDeleteAgain, off the top of my head, some of this is obviously the result of beneficial immigration. For example, H.Stern was Jewish refugee from Germany, Jamie Lerner's parents were Jews from Poland, Neimeyer is of German-Jewish ancestry, and of course Brazilian Jujitsu is the result of a Japanese immigrant (Mitsuyo Maeda)'s influence on the Gracie family.
Dave
Manchester has produced some rockers of Irish origin as well: Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis, Morrissey and Johnny Marr of The Smiths.
ReplyDeleteBut not the boys from Joy Division. I couldn't get definitive info on this, but Curtis, Sumner, and Hook are all native English surnames.
John Lydon of The Sex Pistols was also Irish, but they were formed in London.
More on Manchester.
ReplyDeleteMick Hucknall of Simply Red is apparently half English, half Jewish. Pete Shelley (Pete McNeish) of The Buzzcocks seems to be of Irish origin. His bandmate Howard Devoto (Howard Trafford) seems to be from an old pre-Norman English family.
A more direct test of this relative to America is to compare the breakthroughs of the homogenous period, 1960's and earlier, with the pro-diversity era of quotas and mass immigration from really different populations
ReplyDeleteThere is no comparison.
As recently as the 1960's it was possible for an entire science, namely, geology, to be revolutionized, as with the continental drift theory's demonstration and general acceptance.
Since then, there have been no important novels,plays, paintings, books of poetry, musical compositions or new movements in liberal arts or social science.
There have been no great breakthrough inventions or major scientific theories to win general acceptance.
It was foretold, though that a sort of hybrid vigor effect of interacting cultures and subcultures would enhance creativity and innovation.
Hybrids are generally inferior to their parents, their genes being more likely to have incompatibilities between them, the more diverse the parent stocks.
This would follow for mixes of cultures and subcultures as well; the more diverse from each other they are, the less their parts may be expected to function as if co-adapted.
The point about the wish for social peace between hostile or embarassingly unequal diversities, causing codes of silence to stifle free inquiry ,honesty and candor, could explain a lot of our present hybrid low fertility of culture.
Concern for truth is what allows for progress in culture.
ReplyDeleteConcern for smoothing the ruffled feathers of wounded ethnic pride, with no end of lies and conspiracies of silence, reflects a priority which is clearly not compatible with significant progress of science.
In agreement with JS Bolton, I am resubmitting an earlier remark on the recent PC trend in particle physics:
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that I don't think is fully appreciated is just how widespread is the destructiveness of the PC concept in Academia. The idea that evidence doesn't really matter, and that agreement is a substitute for thought has penetrated into the highest reaches of physics. For example, there are many complaints now about the culture of String Theory in the U.S. and the parlous state it is in. Some very prominent physicists have been arguing that empirical evidence may be unimportant and should be deprecated in judgements of a theory's strength and viability. Some are calling this the rise of post modernism in physics, but it is more directly a corollary of the PC meme and the cultural Marxism that Simon (in another thread) has pointed to. "As long as we have agreement and conformity we are on the shining path to the future."
I think people have just not grasped how thoroughly Western culture has changed in the last twenty years — and not for the better. Diversity is not directly to blam, but it has a spin-off in the willingness to accept lies and spin rather than persuing the truth.
Sorry, when I said " Diversity is not directly to blame" I meant only that it is not directly to blame for the situation is science. It IS directly to blame for many, many other ills.
ReplyDeleteBolton, are you serious? "no important novels, plays..."? Are you familiar with Thomas Pynchon? Jonathan Updike? Richard Powers? Saul Bellow? Each of them wrote important books since the '60's. Have you heard of playwrights such as Tony Kushner? John Patrick Shanley?
ReplyDeleteAnd no "breakthrough inventions" since the '60's? What are you talking about? You just used one (a personal computer) to post that. No other inventions come to mind for you since the '60's? Do you have a cell phone?
Dave
-----------------------------------
JS Bolton wrote:
Since then [The 1960's], there have been no important novels,plays, paintings, books of poetry, musical compositions or new movements in liberal arts or social science.
There have been no great breakthrough inventions or major scientific theories to win general acceptance.
Charles Murray's book "Human Accomplishment" lets us quantify Jewish contributions to arts and sciences up through 1950. You see a quite low level of Jewish achievement, other than an occasional renegade like Spinoza, up through the ghetto era that ended in 1806. This was not just a product of discrimination, but also of a lack of Jewish interest in the wider world -- Jews tended to be wealthier than Christians up through 1700 or so and didn't really notice the great leaps forward among Christians until late in the 18th century. So, physical integration without cultural integration led to stagnation.
ReplyDeleteThen, boom, starting around 1830, a tremendous efflorescence of Jewish achievement, with Jews outdoing gentiles in Europe per capita by about a 6-1 ratio.
Murray's book ends in 1950 to avoid dubious judgments about recent times, so Israel isn't included. My impression is that 2 million Ashkenazis in Israel haven't really accomplished too many great new things, outside of mathematics and, perhaps, military affairs, at the same rate as their great-grandfathers did in Europe. Israeli contributions to popular culture are especially thin.
Some of this is due to the original Zionist attempt to transform Jews from intellectuals into farmers and warriors, leading to the oddly anti-intellectual climate in Israel.
But it could also have to do with Jewish isolation in Israel. When Jews were trying to break down the doors and gain admittance to the self-confident cultures of 19th Century Western Europe and America, they did great things. But they don't have to compete as hard in Israel, so maybe they aren't doing as much.
It will also be interesting to see whether Jewish achievement falls off in America now that the old WASP ascendancy that they competed against has been overturned.
When the NYT recently surveyed boffins to find the best novel of the last 25 years, almost all the writers named were born in the early 1930s, which doesn't say much for the quality of the arts in America in recent years.
ReplyDeleteSteve, re achievements in Israel:
ReplyDeleteNot sure I agree with you 100% on that one. There have been plenty of scientific and technical achievements in Israel, e.g., instant-messaging, ingestible cameras for medical diagnostics, etc. The commercialization of these inventions is responsible for Israel having the third-highest number of companies on the Nasdaq (after the U.S. and Canada) -- not an unimpressive output for such a tiny country. I'm not sure how much weight the early Zionist emphasis on everyone being farmers still carries. With the modernization of agriculture in Israel dramatically increasing productivity (as it has in all first world countries), a much smaller percentage of the population is involved in farming (again, same as Europe, America, etc.).
Your argument may have more impact on the cultural side, though Israel's relatively short list of internationally recognized novelists (e.g., S.Y. Agnon, Amos Oz, etc.) is also pretty decent compared to the country's small size.
I'd also suggest that if American Jews have slacked off somewhat recently, it's less due to a decline in the WASP establishment than to an overall post-FDR, post-LBJ complacency in the U.S. Times were a lot tougher in the early part of the 20th Century -- before Social Security, Medicare, etc. There may have been more of an urge to achieve out of necessity. I sometimes wonder if Open Borders advocates are hoping to make America a little more Darwinian or Calvinist, to inspire more of the old hustle.
Dave
Steve,
ReplyDeleteOne big (though admittedly awful) Israeli contribution to popular culture comes to mind: The Power Rangers. An Israeli billionaire struck gold with that kids' show.
Dave
Looking at it from a distance I’d say that by far the greatest contributors to serious culture in America are Jews and a thin veneer of wasps: Jews are outrageously over-represented in science, and literature and the arts are divided between Jews and wasps (Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, Thomas Powers, etc.) Almost all male, of course. The contributions from other groups are pretty much negligible — despite publishing companies all over the Western world, but particularly in Britain, having it as part of their mission to promote minorities and women (with the lie that that is what the people REALLY want).
ReplyDeleteThe arts, and literature in particular, aren't totally dead in America. There are lots of very good, but relatively minor novelists, playwrights, and poets right now. But there aren't any really overwhelming giants.
ReplyDeleteI like Tony Kushner, but he's relatively minor. Pynchon can be really funny (The Crying of Lot 49 is wonderful), but compare him with Fielding, Sterne, Dickens, Joyce, Twain, Faulkner. He's not up there. Updike has a nice style, but he's pretty shallow.
The only truly first rate writers out there are probably Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy. I'd plug for the as-yet-little-known, very reclusive African American poet Jay Wright as the best poet. But they're all getting up there.
partial thought wrote:
ReplyDelete"But you can make a case that ethnically diverse societies have been more creative, at least as long as one dominant ethnic group is clearly in charge and the other groups more or less aspire to imitate the ruling group"
I think that's pretty much the definition of a healthy society.
The big problem in the West is not the existence of minority groups per se, but cultural Marxist destruction of the host culture.
It is absurd to claim “there have been no great breakthrough inventions or major scientific theories to win general acceptance”. Regarding breakthrough inventions, advances in computing (supercomputing, internet, wireless networks, Moore’s law, etc), medicine (human genome project, neuroscience, systems biology, personalized targeted drugs, etc) and other fields like material science have created technologies that have not only accelerated the pace of our understanding of ourselves and our world, but have given us ability to shape it and remake ourselves in ways science could not even explain before 1960 without resorting to science fiction.
ReplyDeleteThe number of major scientific theories waiting to be discovered are necessarily decreasing as we technologically evolve and fields become more specialized. This is not a sign of impoverish intellectual output, but a reflection that the landscape of scientific discovery is vastly different from 50, 100 and 1000 yrs ago. As a result, most advances are necessarily more incremental and applied if but far more diverse and numerous.
It’s difficult to argue by any number of measures that intellectual innovation is suffering in our world or America in particular. Look at the growing rate of innovation (papers, patents, etc), the more sophisticated understanding and numerous new tools available to push the frontiers (computers, gene sequencing, biotech agents, etc), the raw number of researchers and the higher quality of such researchers drawn from a larger pool which underpins it all.
Most importantly, society is now far more efficient in identifying, utilizing and financially rewarding genius from around the world which was underutilized or ignored in the 1950s. Think of the USSR under Krushchev which failed to translate theoretical genius into anything much beyond military application, post revolutionary Maoist PRC even before its disastrous Cultural Revolution and impoverished post-colonial India. Think of post war Japan, Korea in a civil war and Israel just being established surrounded by enemies in the desert. Think of the talent wasting away behind the iron curtain in Eastern Europe or anywhere else in the world which is now physically or intellectually connected to major centers of learning and innovation.
Take a walk through a top physics or molecular biology department, Cambridge or Silicon Valley startup or even more quantitative-based Wall Street firm and you’ll see plenty of diversity bounded largely by high-IQ. To claim this diversity in and of itself is harming the competitiveness of these firms is absurd. If this were the case, people would quickly jump on the opportunity and form small startup of homogenous master race individuals free from federal diversity laws (<50 employees) and clean up.
Ken
Ken's right. Not too Shabby. Some on here seem to go beyond objective appraisal of the pros and cons of immigration to an attitude of WASP homogeneity uber alles. It's one thing to slam the MSM for looking at all immigration through rose-colored glasses, but to claim that all immigration has weakened American science, technology, business, etc. is obviously false -- particularly when the opposite can be seen in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, top-tier universities, etc.
ReplyDeleteDave
Now how ethnic diversity *in and of itself* has helped or harmed innovative thinking in the Arts is a more nebulous matter.
ReplyDeleteCertain elites have used diversity as an excuse to promote their own ideological agenda which has put much of liberal arts academia in something of a dark ages. More clearly, mega-mergers and financialization of corporations creating pop art (TV, film, music, books, etc) has been ever more efficiently producing middle-brow sensory rather than high-brow intellectual works.
It would be reasonable to think, just as in the sciences, that drawing from a dramatically larger pool of talent would result in more and higher quality of art. Unfortunately, in the case of arts, external influences such as economics and elite ideology of the times tend to squander this potential for advancing art.
Jsbolton should support his separate and rather bold claim that hybrids resulting from miscegenation in a multicultural society are inferior to parents if he has any scientific basis. Is he is suggesting that IQ or individual and social behavior cannot be selectively bred for as they have been in animal husbandry for thousands of years (behavioral as well as physical traits) and in new research experiments just beginning to explore this area (improved memory and learning complex tasks as a proxies for IQ)? Is he saying that humans have reached the limit in selecting for IQ traits and any further attempts will only result in diseased offspring incompatible with life like certain canine pure breeds?
Many, perhaps most, human genetic diseases are recessive so one would assume miscegenation would be produce hybrid vigor, as least in relation to these disease traits.
High-IQ Ashkenazi Jews are afflicted with a number of such diseases like Tay-Sachs which may relate to IQ (e.g. neural conduction speed or dendritic branching). As noted on gnxp recently, if a particular Ashkenazi and Asian (or Armenian, etc) have different genetic basis for high-IQ and produce mixed offspring they may be able to simultaneously select for IQ and against disease. This could apply to any genetically based trait – not just IQ. I hope there is something more than personal bias to back up this controversial claim least it legitimizes some of the arguments PC-censors level against such important discussions.
Ken
Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, John Stuart Mill, Florence Nightingale, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Benjamin Disraeli, Francis Galton, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Thomas Henry Huxley, William Makepeace Thackeray, Richard Burton, Anthony Trollope, Michael Faraday, Lewis Carroll, David Livingstone, George Eliot….
ReplyDeleteThinker is a vague-ish term but I'd personally exclude Nightingale, Livingstone and Trollope from the list, but add Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson and maybe even Alexander Parkes.
Jupiter touches on an interesting contradiction of immigration restrictionists: They are against Mexicans because they claim they can't stack up to whites in accomplishments and they are against Asians because they can. Your claim that whites don't benefit from Asian immigrants isn't true: whites get jobs selling software that Asians develop, they get to eat bulgogi, they get expert medical treatment from Asian physicians, etc.
ReplyDeleteJupiter, if you want to live in a nearly-all white country, go move to Argentina or Uruguay. The days of WASPS shutting the door behind them in America are long gone.
Dave
Dave
ReplyDeleteAnd who is the determine whether or not legal asian immigration is a great bennefit to NATIVE BORN WHITE AMERICANS? I think you know the answer:NATIVE BORN WHITE AMERICANS.
You also don't think NATIVE BORN WHITE AMERICANS have the balls to physically remove legal asian immigrants and their obnoxious "American" born gene-line.
You are in for a rude awakening.
If NATIVE BORN WHITE AMERICANS didn't have the opton of fleeing to places such as Weddington and Waxhal NC over the past twenty years, if they were trapped on LI and in hindu infested NJ, legal immigration would have been shut down to 0 ten twenty, years ago.
Weddington is filling up very fast.
If the choice was and is between living in trailer parks or physically removing the predatory and obnoxious Legal asian immigrant and his spawn...It will be the latter choice.
When a critical number of NATIVE BORN WHITE MALES realize they have no future in the asian,muslim and hispanic "America"....they shit will hit the fan.
Deprive millions of young NATIVE BORN WHITE MALES marriage,sex, affordable breeding and respectable social status.. and they will violently turn upon those wo decieved them
There is an intersting discussion between Robert Trivers and Noam Chomsky floating around the internet.
Trivers made an intersting observation to Noam Chomsky. Trivers pointed out the following observation about the animal world-from mamals down to insects.
Within different species, when one memeber of the species goes out its way to decieve other members of the species, at the point in time when the other memeers discover that they have been decieved by the deciever, the other memebers of this species will violently attack and kill the member of the sepecies that engaged in the deception.
Think about it folks. I consider your comments DAVE another of the many threats that flow out of the asian and jewish supremacist communities in America.
There is a lot NATIVE BORN WHITE AMERICANS can do about their racial dispossession by asians, sreet by street,town by town, unversity by university across OUR AMERICA
Jupiter.
Ken Shabby — you make good points about scientific innovation, but it doesn't gainsay the fact that, on the ground, it is not just any diversity that is producing this benefit: it is achieved by U.S. graduate schools being a magnet for high IQ people from around the world and then streaming them into high-tech business and science. It is a highly selective process.
ReplyDeleteIt could be argued that the diversity is really epiphenomenal here, and that it is the IQ selection that has ALL the desirable features.
America doesn't need to import her future tech workers,scientists and engineers from Asia.
ReplyDeleteBRING BACK THE CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT
JUPITER
I can't agree with what has been said above, either on the pro- or anti-diversity side.
ReplyDeleteMy point about hybrid tendency to inferiority is established, that the greater the genetic differences between parents, the greater the chance for incompatibility of genes; but this does not imply that different races cannot successfully interbreed.
Taking this analogy to culture, is not meant to be an absolute universal; all sorts of exceptions are possible.
Hybridity of culture does not guarantee low fertility of advance; but it was and still is contended that advance of knowledge is actually hastened by promoting the mix of cultures.
This prediction is not borne out, by referring to cellphone networks, etc. or anything that is an incremental advance over the technology of the 1960's and earlier.
I would like to hold out the position that increased diversity is neither good, nor especially bad, for the advancement of knowledge and life circumstances.
Therefore, the criticism of high expectations for diversity to contribute value, just by being different, appears to stand, as an easily defensible position.
Some breakthroughs of great moment relative to those of the period before the pro-diversity era began its onslaught ca.1970, would be needed to falsify this modest claim.
J.S. Bolton:
ReplyDeleteThere is no doubt that literature and the arts have stagnated over the last forty years, but "no breakthrough" invention? I think it's pretty safe to say that the PC and the Internet have been two extremely significant inventions, on a par with the telephone and television. The conversation we're having right now would have been unimaginable not too long ago.
"One big (though admittedly awful) Israeli contribution to popular culture comes to mind: The Power Rangers. An Israeli billionaire struck gold with that kids' show."
ReplyDeleteUuuggghhhh! I call anti-Semitism! ;)
The proto-Internet dates back to the late sixties, but the World Wide Web proper was invented as late as 1989.
ReplyDeleteI understand that in your later comment you say that the breakthroughs of the recent period are less impressive than those of pre-1965, but as I said, I think the World Wide Web can hold its own with television or radio and the cellular phone, while obviously derived from the pre-1965 telephone, has certainly had a major effect on people's lives as well. How high are you trying to hold the bar for "breakthrough invention" here?
One thing I like about Steve is his apparent Anglophilia.
ReplyDeleteI was minded of this upon reading the following:
Indeed, considering that England was the civilizational father, demographic mother, and template of America, and that America's history, civilization, and culture therefore make no sense apart from England, the Anglophobia frequently seen in paleoconservatism is baffling.
http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol4no1/ja-requiem.html
I propose that "diversity" and "creativity" are independent variables. Like "diversity" vs "tasty fried eggs", like "creativity" vs "abiliy to make funny faces". They are too vaporous a concept to be made sense and be measured and compared. If anything, diversity stresses society, and limits public debate "to keep the peace" (well said!). Early attempts in classification (Linneaus, Sweden, 18th Century) were more honest than current fake blindness.
ReplyDeleteI am all for peace (and necessarily, sadly, for living with lies aka PC) but I am not utterly stupid, so pls no one tell me that diversity liberates creativity when we all know it is not so. Diversity opresses, we all feel liberated and happy only with people like ourselves. Important note: I truly respect people different from myself, I am happy to work with them, eat their food and drink their drinks, enjoy their music and their girls, and will take their money. No PC needed when the heart is true.
David Hume
ReplyDeleteI agree. At least for advancing science, I noted that it is high-IQ knowledge workers drawn from a global pool that are needed (not just a random collection of people who happen to have different cultures and colors). Diversity is a side-effect, not goal, of casting a global net for this type of human talent.
Jsbolton – Several points:
Your idea of “Hybrid Inferiority” is not established. This contradicts fundamental ideas of about the recessive nature of many human diseases and thousands of years of animal husbandry. Regarding hybrid IQ studies, Japanese-Caucasians students tested slightly higher than either Japanese or Caucasian students in Hawaii (I would’ve expected the mean). A popular theory with historical support for the high-IQ’s of the Ashkenazim or Parsi is that this resulted from generations of cultural pressures favoring high-IQ reproduction. Counter examples in the sterility of horse-donkey hybrids are pretty distant if not irrelevant to this topic. I am not an expert in this area of research and wonder if you have any research to support your unlikely opinion.
Your analogy of “Hybrid Inferiority” to culture is a too overarching to productively address. Certainly there are downsides to multicultural society in terms of trust, efficiency, etc. – especially when no regard is given to how best to augment the existing society. You need to back this up with some facts and research. Even then it would be hard to convince people beyond their existing personal biases given how grey results of social science are.
I take most exception to your idea that we’ve technologically stagnated since the 1960’s, especially since you just ignored the decent list of concrete examples and explained how the landscape of scientific discovery is necessarily changing. Another important idea I omitted is that the financialization of technology and individual incentives for researchers has diverted resources from basic R&D to applied technology. We have nothing like a world war or space race to consume so much of our attention and GDP behind basic R&D and the icons of these ages are dying or declining in relative import: Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, DARPA, etc. Read “University Inc.” to see how even academic research centers are becoming funded and guided toward applied research by industry patrons.
Even if you deny the facts and reasoning I presented, you should at least work out the mechanism(s) behind your theory of how diversity is degrading our scientific progress. I have given the self-apparent explanation that by dramatically increasing the pool of human talent we draw upon; we have increased the number and quality of high-IQ knowledge workers advancing our society. Look into academic journals and patent applications in any field of science over the past several decades to see there is a dramatic increase of US universities, research institutions and companies benefiting by immigrants of recent Russian (often Jewish), Israeli, Chinese, Indian, Korean, etc. origin. Are you suggesting all these high-IQ foreigners have in some why retarded America’s scientific progress? If so, how? If not, don’t you need to revisit your theory?
Ken
cody: We have come full circle, for the late Dr. Attarian was of Armenian descent.
ReplyDeleteI think there can be big differences in the types of intelligence different racial groups have. Even groups as similar as Wasps and Irish Catholics.
ReplyDeleteI have witnessed anecdotal evidence of an Irish bussinessman marrying a woman from a fairly blue blooded wasp background and having four kids. Two were below average intelligence and 2 were well above average. I think 2 kids got an advantage from the two different types of intelligence being combined and two got the defecits of both combined.
This is my Mother's maternal aunt and my second cousins. Ones a Doctor, One has two ivy leage degrees and graduated cum laude but has clinical depression. The two cousins on the slow side both worked entry level type jobs.
My Mother has the same WASP background as my Aunt. She married my Father who is from a working class background and is of mixed European ancestry, French German, English possibly some Native American. He has very high visual spatial intelligence as well as...I guess "administrative intelligence"? Bussiness intelligence? Anyway he is a self made millionaire that is a high school drop out due to a bad home life growing up.
My parents IQ's are both about a standard deviation above average with my mothers being a bit higher.(115-120) My mothers sister has an IQ in the 150 range. My Dad has a sister that is slow.
My IQ is higher than that of both my parents. 130. My sisters is 89
So I think both theories of the value of hybridization being a plus or negative can be true in a single family.
It is irrelevant whether Legal asian immigrants advanced American scientific development. The fundamental issue is the future racial comoposition of America.
ReplyDeleteOnly a handfull of NATIVE BORN WHITE AMERICANS HAVE bennefitted from the presence of obnoxious Legal asian immigrants
Here are two of them:THE PARASITES BILL GATES AND LARRY ELLISON(ELLISON IS VERY FOUND OF REPLACING OVER 40 NATIVE BORN WHITE MALES WITH YOUNGER ASIAN MALES. Total piece of shit as is Gates)
IT IS INTERESTING TO NOTE THAT LEGAL IMMIGRANT IMMIGRATION REFORMER PETER BRIMELOW-NICE SPREAD IN THE BERSHIRES PETE-IS EAGER TO IMPORT AN EVEN GREATER NUMBER OF LEGAL ASIAN IMMIGRANTS INTO OUR AMERICA
Jupiter
BRING BACK THE CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT
Relevant to the topic, which is whether diversity, such as that of the races and the cultures associated with large populations in the world...
ReplyDeleteI can answer the points raised on progress: the internet with its new features is like integrated circuits incrementally improved with smaller size and larger capacity, wireless telephony is old, but cellphone networks are newer, and that is like the development of a network of service stations for automobiles was, relative to the breakthrough inventions which occurred earlier. Personal computers is more of a nameplate breakthrough. There's been 50 years of great progress on integrated circuits, but then something else has to initiate a new round of incremental advances along a predictable line, such as miniaturization, in this case.
DALevin in Am Sci 5-02, p.254 says "most hybrids are inferior to their parents" which is "reflection of the differences of the parents". There is plenty to show hybrid vigor, from a condition of inbreeding depression, involving really close breeding; but for the rest of the spectrum, each additional increment of genetic distance, implicates the 'differences of the parents' which predicts a greater chance of inferiority, as the parents are more diverse genetically from each other. There is no vagueness in the measure of relatedness and genetic distance.
There is a 'void for vagueness' character in the courts' analogy of diversity that is cultural, to hybrid vigor in biology.
I find this analogy to be very weak, as can be seen as soon as you apply it further; e.g. hybrid low fertility, sterility, outbreeding depression etc. If the analogy can be used to say quotas for the disadvantaged are somehow like a biological imperative, why are the further implications of the analogy not to be considered?
Regarding the international recruitment for top schools, any benefit of this does not come from the diversity, but the homogeneity of those recruited as for IQ, specific knowledge, credentials, specific language ability, etc.
In any case, we have not a stagnation in sciences, but a rate of progress which is not the spectacular one, nor even an improvement( in rate of progress) over the much lower-diversity environment of 40 or more years ago.
The pro-diversity account predicts otherwise; that there would be an efflorescence attributable to increased diversity itself, and even tries to justify horrific anti-merit policies on the basis of this prediction, which has no convincing support in the history of technology science or elsewhere.
How can these canons be anything other than ethnic propaganda? Political dominance is the handmaiden of cultural dominance. People are like women: they follow the scent of money.
ReplyDeleteWould people really give a damn about Faulkner and Jefferson and Rock N' Roll if the U.S. wasn't the global Uncle Warbucks (literally) in the mid-20th century? Once a country starts making some money, good patriots dig out all the works of the local bohemians and has-been politicians and call it a "Canon" of their national greatness.
Or theory #2: in truly dynamic economies, intellectuals are snatched up for real work.
Benjamin Disraeli was of Jewish origin, so in his case the 'diversity' argument would actually be correct.
ReplyDeleteDoes non-White innovators' believe in diversity include the necessity of diversifying with White talent?
ReplyDeleteOr is "diversity" (goal or byproduct) defended by non-Whites simply as part of an ethnic strategy to dominate?
Will a White scientist get a job in China - or California? (Will a non-Jew anywhere?)
How fair are the people WASPs are fair to? How does the ethical fairness in racial matters of non-White societies compare to that of White societies? Hottentots were not notable abolitionists.
Let's not make this issue more complicated than it really is.
ReplyDeleteThe chinese and hindus are here to conquer US. They probably can't believe their good fotune to have a NATIVE BORN WHITE AMERICAN population-made passive by years of psychological warfare waged against them by "american" Jews-offering the resistance of a doormat for three decades.
Things are changing. NATIVE BORN WHITE AMERICANS are fighting back.
The resistance to the chinese and hindu conquest of OUR AMERICA will grow much stronger over the next few years-especially if the lefty environmentalist have their way.
If the lefty environmentalist have their way, land that could otherwise be used to build affordable living and breeding space for young NATIVE BORN WHITE MALES will be set aside for endangered species.
When this happens, there will be no more saftey valve. The chinese and the hindu will booted out of OUR AMERICA.
The legal immigrant asian and their obnoxious "american" born gene-line wouldn't tolerate- for a second- the very same legal immigration policy that they expect NATIVE BORN WHITE AMERICANS to put with.
Their intentions towards us are not benign.
BRING BACK THE CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT
Jupiter
Jsbolton –
ReplyDeleteThe Internet is not an incremental improvement on ICs. One advanced information theory while the other advanced electronic circuitry. To call the Internet an incremental improvement on the IC is like calling airplanes incremental improvements on metallurgy. In other words, the Internet was hardly an obvious next step after fabricating the first p-n junction but rather just a profound invention enabled because of the IC among other inventions (which itself was enabled by previous inventions).
Even ignoring the three fundamental shifts from fundamental R&D to more applied discoveries, you still addressed why we have had such an explosion of innovation in the past several decades by any number of metrics. You dismiss as “incremental” the some of greatest fundamental innovations of human history in how we’ve laid the groundwork for transforming humans’ at the most basic genetic and molecular levels. Do you have any “quantitative” metrics to justify your claim that the rate of innovation has slowed down since 1960 or can you provide a definition of fundamental vs incremental innovation?
Googling “DA Levin” reveal he researches cases of outbreeding depression in certain plants where future hybrids mating scenarios may produce sterile offspring – this does not apply to humans. To suggest human miscegenation results in inferior offspring based upon plant sterility (pre/post zygotic barriers) is wrong.
Ken
The above misrepresents my points.
ReplyDeleteA metric of significant contributions is provided in C Murray's Human Accomplishment, which covers technology.
The internet is incremental over 60's technology, and it is an outgrowth of improvements in underlying electronics power, without any great breakthroughs such as would appear in HA for tech, if it were extended to the present year.
Levin is quoted only to demonstrate that it is uncontroversial in biology that the greater the genetic differences are between parents, the greater the chance for incompatibility of genes in the offspring. None of this depends on plants vs. animals vs. people, nor on race, nor on any such particularism. It is a general rule; yet one that admits of individual cases being divergent from the overall pattern.
The courts used the analogy of hybrid vigor, but even in technology there is none to be found, when evidence of this would consist of a greater number of breakthrough inventions such as could make the HA threshold of significance, post-1970 vs. pre-.
Another metric is the hugely increased average age of Nobel prizewinners in science and medicine,etc. since the 1960's.
The pro-diversity era here begins '70 or '71 with Griggs, and mass immigration on a basis lacking in discrimination as to quality.
In theory, with less common language
one should expect the assembled diversity to fracture and fail to realize any possible gains from specialization, that a larger-sized population recruited, sometimes allows.
There is greater friction between the parts which were expected to function as if adapted one to another, but are mutant relative to each other.
If an additional increment of diversity were helpful, than so would be a mutation, to a living being and its descendants; if one is to follow the courts' reckless and unreasonable analogy, as if it were legitimate.
Mutations however, are good only in some very rare percentage, like 1 in a million. The Mutagenic (double-stress) is to be presumed harmful. If it causes mutations, and a series of them over time, this can not reasonably be called good for life; not qua mutagen.
My reply is to Jody's comment related to what Brazil's diversity has offered. Little has come from there? Haven't you heard of Chico Buarque, Milton Nascimento Music? Or the art of Di Cavalcanti and Tarsilla do Amaral? The poetry of Carlos Drummond and Cecilia Meireles? The books of Paulo Coelho? The architecture achievements of Oscar Niemayer? The break trhough techniques on Plastic Surgery from Ivo Pitanguy? The highest paid top Model on the world Gisele Bünchen? The greatest Formula 01 pilot of all times Ayrton Sena? Just to name a few. Thank heavens for diversity.
ReplyDelete