Over at Daily Kos, somebody calling himself Erasmussimo (not a bad nom de blog, by the way) has posted a long takedown of the study of Human Biodiversity: "Racism Has a New Name: HBD."
Surprisingly, it's not at all that bad.
Poor Erasmussimo must feel himself teetering on the edge of the rabbit hole because he includes praise for realists all the way from Edward O. Wilson and Steven Pinker to HBD Chick. Fortunately, his hatred for that awful "Steve Sailor" * guy helps him keep his feet thoroughly on the ground of respectability.
If anybody from Daily Kos has furtively ducked over here to find out what all the crimethinking is about:
Here's a 13 minute video interview with me on "What is HBD?"
--------------
* The reason I came up with "iSteve" back in the 1990s is because so many people get wrong the spelling of either my first name ("Steven," not "Stephen" as in Stephen Jay Gould -- why did his Marxist dad name him after the most notorious robber baron of the 19th Century, anyway?) or last name ("Sailer," not "Sailor" or "Saylor" or "Sayler" or "Seiler" or whatever). It was more reasonable for me to change to something easy to remember how to spell when searching on Alta Vista or Yahoo than for me to expect everybody else to remember how to spell my name.
P.S. I appreciate commenters who have taken the time to give Erasmussimo's real name, but I won't approve them because I don't like to out anybody. So, if you were planning to write a long comment on the subject, let me point out that nobody will read it except me. (This is not to imply that I don't like hearing gossip about who is really whom, but I try not to pass it on.)
* The reason I came up with "iSteve" back in the 1990s is because so many people get wrong the spelling of either my first name ("Steven," not "Stephen" as in Stephen Jay Gould -- why did his Marxist dad name him after the most notorious robber baron of the 19th Century, anyway?) or last name ("Sailer," not "Sailor" or "Saylor" or "Sayler" or "Seiler" or whatever). It was more reasonable for me to change to something easy to remember how to spell when searching on Alta Vista or Yahoo than for me to expect everybody else to remember how to spell my name.
P.S. I appreciate commenters who have taken the time to give Erasmussimo's real name, but I won't approve them because I don't like to out anybody. So, if you were planning to write a long comment on the subject, let me point out that nobody will read it except me. (This is not to imply that I don't like hearing gossip about who is really whom, but I try not to pass it on.)
Racism should mean race-ism. Belief in the reality of races and racial differences.
ReplyDeleteWe see race-ism in practice in the 100 and 200 m sprints, makeup of football and MMA, in the imbalance of interracist couples, in Jewish over-representation in high IQ fields, in Jewish control of media and law, in the economic advantages white and yellow nations have over black and brown ones, and etc.
Liberals focus more on the word than on the world. They think if they attack the word 'race', there will be no race-ism in the world, but race-ism can be found all over the world. Why do many more poor blacks beat up poor whites than vice versa? Race-ism.
Erasmussimo’s attempt at creating a distinction between the good progressively-minded sociobiologists & evolutionary psychologists like E. O. Wilson & Steven Pinker, and those disreputable evil racist conservative HBDists like Steve Sailer & Charles Murray is rather laughable, and indicates a lack of familiarity with the “impeccable” and “rigorous” writings of those he praises. E. O. Wilson acknowledges innate population differences in psychological traits in his landmark book Sociobiology, pointing to Daniel G. Freedman’s research on racial differences in infant development. Wilson also praised Arthur R. Jensen as an “honest, courageous man” and defended John Philippe Rushton’s application of r/K selection theory to human populations, and praised Frank Salter's book On Genetic Interests as a "fresh and deep contribution to the sociobiology of humans".
ReplyDeleteSteven Pinker defended Richard Herrnstein’s 1971 Atlantic Monthly article on IQ and societal genetic stratification which caused howls of outrage amongst leftists as so obviously true as to be “banal”. Despite his professed skepticism of innate group differences in cognitive ability in The Blank Slate, Pinker has since made clear during his Jews, Genes and Intelligence talk he gave at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research that he thinks Cochran & Harpending’s theory on Ashkenazi IQ is plausible. And of course, there is 2004′s The Best American Science and Nature Writing book that Steven Pinker edited, which included an article by that disreputable racist Steve Sailer.
/slightly revised repost from hbdchick comments section
B.B.
http://now.msn.com/jackie-chan-calls-us-most-corrupt-country-in-the-world/
ReplyDeleteI've never seen someone be able to be so rational on evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics but irrational when it comes to IQ and race differences. And his irrationality is sprinkled with hints of rationality, like when he says IQ is predictive and that there is a constant gap between blacks and whites that won't go away.
ReplyDeleteThe minds of the deniers do not work like that. I think this guy is a secret HBD believer.
"At the scientific end of the range we have people like HBD Chick, who aggregate lots of evidence on matters anthropological and genetic as they relate to human behavior. At the other extreme we have Steve Sailor, a conservative who promulgates racist ideas."
ReplyDeleteHe's obviously never read your blog. You were one of the first aggregators of this information. And weren't you the one that coined the term HBD?
Hey Steve,
ReplyDeleteI know this isn't related, but I think I may have found something Mexican-Americans excel at and are actually overrepresented in comparison to other ethnic groups in the United States (other than crime rates, of course).
Behold, Mexican-Americans excel at beating the living crap out of other people (Mixed Martial Arts)!
Look at this list of Mexican-American MMA Fighters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_mixed_martial_artists_of_Mexican_descent
Now, in comparison to other Ethnic Groups in the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_mixed_martial_artists_by_ethnicity
Sure, there are more American Blacks. However, American Blacks have not fared well in the MMA dominion.
The current UFC Heavyweight Champion is Cain "Brown Pride" Velasquez.
I guess it just goes to show that racism is really just a meaningless epithet, much like "fascist". It just means a white person who a leftist doesn't like.
ReplyDeleteIt is also telling how Erasmussimo talks like a believer in a religion, not a scientist. See:
"If solid evidence arises that blacks are cognitively less capable than whites, then I shall accept the hypothesis and move on to asking how we reconcile scientific conclusions with political theory."
Note here that it is scientific conclusions that must be reconciled with the political theory, and not the other way around. Leftist political thought is revealed truth and not subject to modification based on an understanding of reality.
"So far, however, the evidence I have seen is completely inadequate to support the hypothesis."
Ay, there's the rub. The key to remain a sound, doctrinaire anti-racist leftist useful idiot is that you must carefully avert your eyes whenever your eyes chance upon any good evidence. The alternative is to be a hypocrite.
"I think this guy is a secret HBD believer."
ReplyDeleteMore likely, he will be one someday. Right now, he clearly has Doubts.
You mean you're not the gay dude who writes mystery novels set in the late Roman Republic?
ReplyDeleteHow in God's name does the fact that "national IQ scores are correlated with GDP per capita" undermine HBD?
ReplyDeleteThe author gets the hard and soft parts of HBD backwards. IQ research is the hard kernel of HBD because it represents one of the most robust bodies of research in all of social and behavioral science. IQ is also the model phenotype of behavioral genetics, which means that we know more about the genetics of IQ than any other complex trait. In contrast, evolutionary psychology, Wilsonian sociobiology, etc. are soft fields that suffer from many of the traditional problems of social science and rarely allow for strong causal conclusions. (International IQ comparisons are, however, soft science, too, unlike, say, black-white comparisons in the US. This is because of obvious measurement issues.)
ReplyDeleteOoh, I know! "Erasmussimo" is actually Half Sigma.
ReplyDeleteIdeas are often most furiously denounced as racism just before they slide quietly into the conventional wisdom box. You should be proud Steve. This guy may just put you in the history books.
ReplyDeleteGloria
.. riding on the coattails of this respectable work is the HBD movement, populated mostly by eager amateurs rather than professional scientists.
ReplyDeleteYou can tell he's a real lefty by his veneration of those "professional scientists". A crimethinker by the name of Bakunin had this to say about the emerging left back in 1872 -
The government will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today. It will administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land . . . All that will demand the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class*, a new hierarchy . . . the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!
Of course Bakunin was writing before the David Brooks of the world spoke out in favor of the government also administering the behavior and the emotions of the masses. Merely micro-managing economic matters is just so passe in the 21st century!
*(I believe this is the first historical reference to the "New Class" about which so much has been written since)
It appears that the key to determining whether an HBDer is racist is whether he is also a conservative.
ReplyDeleteTypical liberal sees everything in terms of partisanship and power. (Who? Whom? indeed).
"You mean you're not the gay dude who writes mystery novels set in the late Roman Republic?"
ReplyDeleteFor some reason, Steven Saylor's publisher never confuses the spelling of our names when it comes to making out to whom his royalty checks are payable.
"They triumphantly trumpet the results that support their prejudices and quietly ignore results that undermine their prejudices, such as the finding that national IQ scores are correlated with GDP per capita."
ReplyDeleteWhat.
OT- book buried on steroids.
ReplyDelete"One year before the 2000 Olympics, at a small meet in Ringwood, Melbourne, Werner Reiterer-fueled by banned drugs-hurled a discus 69.69 m. Had he repeated that throw at the Games, he'd have won gold. But Reiterer did not compete in Sydney. Instead, he quit athletics, wrote a book about doping-among the most disturbing published on the subject-and dumped it in the host nation's lap just two months before the Opening Ceremony. "
"In this book you will learn the story of a very promising discus thrower who rose up the ranks in Australia and eventually the world. You will learn that when he broke a junior world record, he was treated with indifference by a hypocritical system which perpetuated the problem while simultaneously denouncing it in the media. Werner went to two Olympics as a “natural”, steadfastly sticking to his guns. In the end he gave in because “To go through all the pain and sacrifice, the hard winters, busting your guts morning and night, then to travel the world and be beaten by inferior athletes with inferior technique is very hard to deal with”."
http://www.danielyeow.com/oldsite/positive.htm
Edward O. Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama - or The Mouth Of Hell, as it's known on the left. He can't be one of the Good Guys.
ReplyDeleteDerbyshire worries the elites will turn "racist" and clearly, they never will. Their "anti-Racism" (really hate hate hate for ordinary White people who don't live in Murray's SuperZips) is a religion they will not give up.
ReplyDeleteHowever, ordinary people having no wealthy margin and sinecures, must concern themselves with truth. Not pretty lies. And there is money to be made, when that is scarce, knowing what is true and what is false.
For example, the bonds of say, Portland OR, or Seattle WA, or BOISE ID, are likely pretty secure, while those of Detroit, or Baltimore, or Chicago are likely worthless, and won't be repaid in anything like the full face value. Haircuts are coming due. If you're smart, knowing Black run cities can't scrape up two cents, much less make good on bonds written years earlier, while White run cities full of wealthy yuppies are good for it, is worth money.
"because he includes praise for realists all the way from Edward O. Wilson and Steven Pinker to HBD Chick. Fortunately, his hatred for that awful "Steve Sailor" * guy helps him keep his feet thoroughly on the ground of respectability. "
ReplyDeleteno country for humble men(and chicks)
Frank Salter briefly discusses racism in this article:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2010/6/the-misguided-advocates-of-open-borders
saying, "“racism” has no agreed definition and has been deployed for ideological and ad hominem purposes. It is more an instrument of abuse than of reason. If its use cannot be avoided it should be reserved to describe ethnically aggressive statements and acts, not the peaceful expression of pro-social sentiments common to humans everywhere."
I think that racism is just when white people and white people only, notice any racial differences, and actually talk about them.
The essay author disagrees that "blacks are cognitively less capable than whites".
ReplyDeleteWell, if you append "on average" before and after that phrase for clarification, then it's undoubtably true.
And that can be known using only things that the author concedes in other parts of his essay.
1. This is true irrespective of the factor structure of intelligence. Whether there is a single g factor, or dozens of independent intelligences doesn't matter. On verbal, spatial, working memory, mathematical, etc. tasks, blacks score more poorly thank whites *on average*. Their poorer performance is consistent across domains and matches the sort of difference in performance seen between people of the same race who are overall more or less cognitively capable.
2. This is true irrespective of the fundamental causes. It doesn't matter if it's entirely due to prenatal environment. It doesn't matter if it's entirely due to the lasting psychosocial harm of slavery. It doesn't matter if it's due to soft bigotry of low expectations. The fundamental cause does not matter with respect to the phenotype and it's implications.
3. Not only is it true, but we seem to have no idea how to change it. It's not a function of the tests. It's not something that goes away with adoption of black infants into white homes. It's not something that early school interventions seem to fix. It appears to happen around the world and in every culture it's been examined.
That damned Steve Sailor(sic), he actually tells the truth and has principles.... Truly rotten, terrible!
ReplyDeleteWhile it isn't entirely true that "there is no such thing as bad publicity," it's a pretty reliable rule of thumb. I don't see anything bad about this.
ReplyDeleteNear the end of the article he uncorks this stand alone line:
ReplyDeleteBut of course, racism is always born of stupidity.
So, since HBDers are reliable racists in Erasmussimo's world, they have flunked his IQ test.
Word.
"I think this guy is a secret HBD believer."
ReplyDeleteMore likely, he will be one someday. Right now, he clearly has Doubts.
Would those professed Doubts have anything to do with Dollars--that is to say, the fear of their absence--by any chance?
I always thought that the naming of the bad guy in Heroes was intended to be a dig at Steve Sailer.
ReplyDeleteTim MacKring and the rest of the producers [MacHammer, MacArkush, MacBeeman] of that series were all Scots-Irish.
Erasmussimo is definitely not Half Sigma. He is a famous game designer and writer. I have read all his books about game design. He wrote the first one in 1984. A real pioneer and a very smart guy who I have admired for 20 years. When it comes to HBD I'm not so impressed by his thinking though...
ReplyDeleteThe key to remain a sound, doctrinaire anti-racist leftist useful idiot is that you must carefully avert your eyes whenever your eyes chance upon any good evidence.
ReplyDeleteTom Wolfe on IQ:
Not long ago, according to two neuroscientists I interviewed, a firm called Neurometrics sought out investors and tried to market an amazing but simple invention known as the IQ cap. The idea was to provide a way of testing intelligence that would be free of “cultural bias,” one that would not force anyone to deal with words or concepts that might be familiar to people from one culture but not to people from another. The IQ Cap recorded only brain waves; and a computer, not a potentially biased human test-giver, analyzed the results. It was based on the work of neuroscientists such as E. Roy John, who is now one of the major pioneers of electroencephalographic brain imaging; Duilio Giannitrapani, author of The Electrophysiology of Intellectual Functions; and David Robinson, author of The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Personality Assessment: Toward a Biologically Based Theory of Intelligence and Cognition and many other monographs famous among neuroscientists. I spoke to one researcher who had devised an IQ Cap himself by replicating an experiment described by Giannitrapani in The Electrophysiology of Intellectual Functions. It was not a complicated process. You attached sixteen electrodes to the scalp of the person you wanted to test. You had to muss up his hair a little, but you didn’t have to cut it, much less shave it. Then you had him stare at a marker on a blank wall. This particular researcher used a raspberry-red thumbtack. Then you pushed a toggle switch. In sixteen seconds the Cap’s computer box gave you an accurate prediction (within one-half of a standard deviation) of what the subject would score on all eleven sub-tests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale or, in the case of children, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children – all from sixteen seconds’ worth of brain waves. There was nothing culturally biased about the test whatsoever. What could be cultural about staring at a thumbtack on a wall? The savings in time and money were breathtaking. The conventional IQ test took two hours to complete; and the overhead, in terms of paying test-givers, test-scorers, test-preparers, and the rent, was $100 an hour at the very least. The IQ Cap required about fifteen minutes and sixteen seconds – it took about fifteen minutes to put the electrodes on the scalp – and about a tenth of a penny’s worth of electricity. Neurometrics’s investors were rubbing their hands and licking their chops. They were about to make a killing.
In fact – nobody wanted their damnable IQ Cap!
It wasn’t simply that no one believed you could derive IQ scores from brain waves – it was that nobody wanted to believe it could be done. Nobody wanted to believe that human brainpower is… that hardwired. Nobody wanted to learn in a flash that… the genetic fix is in. Nobody wanted to learn that he was… a hardwired genetic mediocrity… and that the best he could hope for in this Trough of Mortal Error was to live out his mediocre life as a stress-free dim bulb. Barry Sterman of UCLA, chief scientist for a firm called Cognitive Neurometrics, who has devised his own brain-wave technology for market research and focus groups, regards brain-wave IQ testing as possible – but in the current atmosphere you “wouldn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of getting a grant” to develop it.
"How in God's name does the fact that 'national IQ scores are correlated with GDP per capita' undermine HBD?"
ReplyDelete------
I believe it is a direction-of-causation argument.
"but I am willing to entertain the hypothesis that some men are born with lesser cognitive talents than others. If solid evidence arises that blacks are cognitively less capable than whites, then I shall accept the hypothesis and move on to asking how we reconcile scientific conclusions with political theory."
ReplyDeleteWell, he seems open to the possibility at least. Maybe in due time he will become a iSteve reader? It took me some time to get here, too.
I'm surprised at the authors openness to the possible validity of HBD. "If solid evidence arises that blacks are cognitively less capable than whites, then I shall accept the hypothesis and move on to asking how we reconcile scientific conclusions with political theory."
ReplyDeleteThe fact that a presumably liberal author even considers that HBD could some day be scientifically demonstrated is simply amazing.
How in God's name does the fact that "national IQ scores are correlated with GDP per capita" undermine HBD?
ReplyDeleteBecause he thinks wealth causes intelligence, which is at least counterintuitive.
How the hell did they get rich if they were stupid? That is the obvious question.
Nontheless they persist in generally pointing the arrow in the wrong direction. Here is another one. Being rich makes women and thinner and better looking rather than the latter leading to the former.
If Watson wasn't canned for 'racism', then what was the reason? So how is HBD = racism in any way "new"?
ReplyDeleteBTW, if Watson had said Asians have a higher average IQ than Whites, and that's why they are over-represented at a growing number of American institutions of higher learning, then he would not have been 'compelled to retire'.
Anonymous 1/12/13 3:55 PM
ReplyDeleteJust look to boxing for a very rich history of Mexican fighters. I am not surprised to see that continuing with MMA. It's a large part of the culture. See boxing announcer Lupe Contreras' catch phrase for insight.
Somewhat related question: why the lack of African contestants in the World's Strongest Man?
Funny. That's got to be a plug or a play of some kind. I am invisioning Steve on Bill Maher one of these days.
ReplyDelete@Jack Bolling,
ReplyDelete“wouldn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of getting a grant”
Uhm, maybe we can point out that China is probably interested in this technology in order to squeeze out the maximum potential of their populace.
"Tim MacKring and the rest of the producers [MacHammer, MacArkush, MacBeeman] of that series were all Scots-Irish."
ReplyDeleteI used to work on Heroes. Aside from Kring and Jeph Loeb, the two main writers on that show when it was good were gay WASP Bryan Fuller and half-Mexican MILF Natalie Chaidez. http://www-deadline-com.vimg.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/chaidez__121110023130-275x337.png
I've turned several people on to your blog, Steve, and they all say, "yeah, the damned Leftists are really as bad as the Creationists."
ReplyDeleteSo true.
Hey, Daily Kosians, why do you refuse to believe in evolution?
It took me some time to get here, too.
ReplyDeleteAin't that the truth.
Give 'em a book on population genetics.
ReplyDeleteOh, wait, I forgot: they don't like empirical data.
You have to remember, Steve, these are the guys and gals that majored in journalism, literature, sociology, cultural anthropology, ethnic studies, women's studies, children's studies, puppy studies, GLBT studies, guppy studies, you know, all those touchy feely things that have made them anti-science.
ReplyDelete"but I am willing to entertain the hypothesis that some men are born with lesser cognitive talents than others."
ReplyDeleteActually, it's pretty obvious that some people are born with less cognitive talents than others. We all know that, we all have met smart people and dumb people.
The only question (and the only reason why this is such a taboo) is whether in *average* people of certain race or genetic makeup tend to have less cognitive talents than people from a different genetic makeup.
Then again, we don't make such a fuss with other characteristics such as beauty or speed or strength:
http://bigthink.com/e-pur-si-muove/why-is-intelligence-the-measure-of-ultimate-human-worth
Damn, they've got some posters there who think Stephen Gould was the cat's meow.
ReplyDeleteGuess they haven't heard.
If Watson wasn't canned for 'racism', then what was the reason?.
ReplyDeleteLeftism (among the true-believers, at least) is based on the moralistic fallacy -- inferring is from ought. When Watson said that our wanting to preserve equal powers of reason as a universal heritage of humanity is not enough to make it so, he was questioning the assumption that because I really wish the world were a utopia and my parents let me eat iced cream for dinner, therefore my fantasy is reality and damn anyone who says otherwise.
But then again, logic is a tool of white patriarchal oppression, so he might be wrong.
More likely, he will be one someday. Right now, he clearly has Doubts.
ReplyDeleteProbably, but it can be hard to tell because a huge part of 'official anti-racism' is based on extreme mendacity in addition to the traditional pathological hatred and denial of reality.
You just have to patient with these kids and give them the chance to move from "HBD is not true!!!" to "Okay, it's true, but it's not important!!!" to, finally (part A), "Okay, it's both true and important. God I'm depressed," and finally (part B) "Okay, it's both true and important, and that's fine."
I believe it is a direction-of-causation argument.
ReplyDeleteYes, but it's such an unbelievably stupid argument. You either have to believe -- without the slightest evidence -- that the Chinese have been getting massively smarter the last twenty years (and before them the Koreans, and before them the Japanese); or you can believe -- on the basis of plentiful evidence -- that they've always been smart and have been recently applying those smarts in a way that produces prosperity.
I once blogged something similar to that and hated your guts and now I'm a fan, so your "teetering on the edge of the rabbit hole" theory may be dead on.
ReplyDeleteThink it's a false flag?
ReplyDeleteRunning dog style liberals are slowly coming around to biology: Based on decades of trying tons of shit lots of places, we can't make blacks smart and moral. They starve, we can feed 'em. Then they either reproduce to carrying capacity or get real phat. They gots no shoes? We put shoes on a few, and some other Negroes will kill the newly shod for the mad lewt.
In terms of the 'Progressive' vision, it's better if blacks are genetically dim: gene frequencies can be changed. There's no realistic way to change black culture, and even if there were, telling blacks to be less stupid and act whiter is too raciss for progessives.
The less sincere liberals never had much hope or care for blacks, they just got upset with New York's Negroes for rapin' and robbin' Jews like as if they were White.
re "isteve" Im impressed you came up with and stuck to the brand..you know what with Apple and all!
ReplyDeleteIn that case "racism" has a new face too now that Mr. Sailer shaved the beard.
ReplyDelete"
ReplyDeleteFor some reason, Steven Saylor's publisher never confuses the spelling of our names when it comes to making out to whom his royalty checks are payable."
Yeah but look at it the other way, Steve; jody doesn't make that mistake with his contribution checks, either.
Erasmussimo writes in his blog:
ReplyDeleteI caution the reader that the science surrounding IQ test scores is immensely complicated. On the one hand, it is unquestionably predictive of academic and financial success in Westernized nations. On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence that cultural factors strongly influence IQ scores. And there are hundreds of other hands to consider as well.
Erasmussimo! Erasmussimo! While IQ statistics are complex, determining its inputs are not as complex as you think.
Although it *would* be difficult to determine through experimentation precisely what genetic and environmental inputs shape a persons intelligence, the general inputs have been known to animal breeders for 100s of years. They would likely be the accepted meme today if a majority of us still lived on farms and bred animals.
For example, Chaser, a border collie was taught the names of 1022 objects by researchers John Pilley and Alliston Reid.
While choosing a puppy, Pilley and Reid likely had only two requirements.
1) Its parents had to be intelligent.
2) Its parents had to have an energetic desire for work.
These were two intrinsic qualities they could not provide, but had to be passed from parents to puppy.
The environment the researchers did provide was for the dogs; 4 to 5 hours of daily instruction and dog food.
See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/science/18dog.html?_r=2&src=dayp&
An anonymous commenter writes:
ReplyDeleteErasmussimo, AKA [redacted] says: "Conservatives have taken to "reconfiguring" science to agree with their ideology." He then contradicts himself near the end of his piece when he says: "If solid evidence arises that blacks are cognitively less capable than whites, then I shall accept the hypothesis and move on to asking how we reconcile scientific conclusions with political theory. " He has called you names elsewhere, too. Over at peter Frost's comments section he said that you were too political to be taken seriously, or something along those lines.
Jayman writes:
ReplyDeleteOn the possible alternative identity of Erasmussimo. He probably doesn't like me too much. Of course, if this is [redacted], I don't think that's the reason he didn't mention me or Nelson. After all, the existence of a Black and a Hispanic HBD blogger would make the claim that HBD = racism a tougher sell.
Harold writes:
ReplyDeleteErasmussimo is perhaps XXX 'grumpy old man of the computer games industry' YYY. His website is called ZZZ and prominently features a painting of Erasmus. He recently had a debate with Chuck in the comments at 'evo and proud'.
[QUOTE]I mean how many Mexican--mestizo Mexicans--are there in the privileged fields?[/QUOTE]
ReplyDeleteThe reason there are very few Mestizos in the privileged fields is because of their lower I.Q.
That is why they are vastly overrepresented in the minimum wage job field.
Hispanics make up only 15 percent of the general population where I live, yet they make up the majority of fast food workers in my city.
Your average Mestizo is only good enough to work at Jack In The Box, or as they pronounce it "Yack In The Box" because of their horrible English skills.
Quite a gracious (and smart)response here by Steve, one that will likely disorient Kossacks coming here expecting to find an angry racist.
ReplyDelete@silver - "You either have to believe -- without the slightest evidence -- that the Chinese have been getting massively smarter the last twenty years (and before them the Koreans, and before them the Japanese); or you can believe -- on the basis of plentiful evidence -- that they've always been smart and have been recently applying those smarts in a way that produces prosperity."
ReplyDeletethere's a third possibility (which actually fits with your second one, so perhaps it's possibility 2b) ... namely that, while iq is really, really important, other hbd traits can get in the way of a modern sort-of prosperity as well. like my favorite topic: clannishness. which the chinese and other east asians have been for a very long time/still are (to different degrees).
if you can't get various sub-groups within your population to cooperate with one another, then you're going to having problems developing a modern economy, no matter how smart you are (unless you're really, really, really smart!).
Despite his professed skepticism of innate group differences in cognitive ability in The Blank Slate, Pinker has since made clear during his Jews, Genes and Intelligence talk he gave at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research that he thinks Cochran & Harpending’s theory on Ashkenazi IQ is plausible. And of course, there is 2004′s The Best American Science and Nature Writing book that Steven Pinker edited, which included an article by that disreputable racist Steve Sailer.
ReplyDeleteAnd he has rejected the works of Kevin MacDonald and David Sloan Wilson without even reading them, so be sure to take that into account when you form your opinion of Pinker.
Steve, i think he knows the truth of hbd. He is trying to be the thin end of the wedge that gets hbd acceped to the kos crowd
ReplyDeleteIf there is anything that demonstrates anti-racism is a religion more effectively than the comment thread attached to Eramussimo's article, I'd like to see it.
ReplyDeleteTalk about a hallelujah chorus in violent agreement on:
1) Racists (and red-staters) are bad
2) Test scores are meaningless (although no doubt everyone over there with high scores is secretly very proud of this..)
3) There may be something such as group differences, but it is so exceedingly subtle and tainted by admixtures that it is essentially undetectable.
And these are the folks who supposedly believe in science, objective debate, scientific humanism, etc?
It is beyond comical and these, my friends, are the same ones who want to take your guns away and consider you as morally reprehensible and disposable as kulaks.
We all know how that ended up last time....
"“racism” has no agreed definition and has been deployed for ideological and ad hominem purposes. It is more an instrument of abuse than of reason. If its use cannot be avoided it should be reserved to describe ethnically aggressive statements and acts, not the peaceful expression of pro-social sentiments common to humans everywhere."
ReplyDeleteThat's great, Frank, but it would be a lot better if you published that book you were planning to publish circa 2000 instead of cribbing my ideas for no particular purpose.
Keep up the good work, I just donated.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous writes:
ReplyDelete"Erasmussimo is definitely not Half Sigma. He is a famous game designer and writer. I have read all his books about game design. He wrote the first one in 1984. A real pioneer and a very smart guy who I have admired for 20 years. When it comes to HBD I'm not so impressed by his thinking though...' Oh, no, not [redacted]??????? I'm afraid he got pretty beat up on Peter Frost's blog the other day. It was pretty pathetic.
"They would likely be the accepted meme today if a majority of us still lived on farms and bred animals."
ReplyDeleteHaving grown up on a farm myself, I've often thought that most of today's dumbest ideas could only have taken hold after most people moved into the cities and lost touch with nature.
Steve - having graciously (and correctly IMHO) refused to out the anonymous critic, you (as moderator) seem to be doing so obliquely, rather than directly) in the comments.
ReplyDeleteHaving gone to the moral high ground, a righteous thing to do, why not stay there and zap those comments?
(I neither know nor care who the guy is, btw)
@engineer dad - "They would likely be the accepted meme today if a majority of us still lived on farms and bred animals."
ReplyDelete@cail - "Having grown up on a farm myself, I've often thought that most of today's dumbest ideas could only have taken hold after most people moved into the cities and lost touch with nature."
i think this is really right and have said so many times myself! i wasn't raised on a farm -- am just one-generation removed from the farm, tho, and spent large parts of my childhood on my grandparents' farm -- but i know a lot of farmers and none of them are fooled by the "it's all nurture" meme.
the other thing that's confused people, i think, is the reduction in the number of kids people have on average. if you've got just one kid, you can maybe fool yourself into thinking that you've really shaped his personality, but the minute you have more than one ... or several ... then you can see innate nature in action. (^_^)
I used to work on Heroes. Aside from Kring and Jeph Loeb, the two main writers on that show when it was good were gay WASP Bryan Fuller and half-Mexican MILF Natalie Chaidez. http://www-deadline-com.vimg.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/chaidez__121110023130-275x337.png
ReplyDeleteSo what about my suspicion that "Sylar" == "Sailer"?
PS: You're aware that MacChaidez is a Sep-highlander name, right?
@rightsaidfred 5:47.
ReplyDeleteRight on!
Anonydroid at 10:53 pm said: Truth is cool because it's fun, like perky mammaries.
ReplyDeleteHunsdon: I first read a "he's" for the "it's" and thought, "If anonydroid feels this way about Truth, how does he feel about Whiskey?" Shudder.
Whiskey said: Derbyshire worries the elites will turn "racist" and clearly, they never will. Their "anti-Racism" (redacted) is a religion they will not give up.
Hunsdon asked: Do you think Derbyshire might have been on to something when he asked Kristol, "Maybe they just don't like Christians?"
Anonydroid at 1:53 AM asked: Having gone to the moral high ground, a righteous thing to do, why not stay there and zap those comments?
Hunsdon responded: Hear, hear. Too many little hints working against the overall stated goal.
Certainly, on one Hand, there is a Really big reason why someone might try to post such ridiculous nonsense against hbd. I think if i had a little less integrity, saying these things about Steve might allow me to Capitalize on the current power momentum- Recent changes in the flow of the American Way. Financially it could make sense in the short term to be a liberal even if you support an Orwellian Reformation of society. Destruction of what your ancestors built, ruining the lives of your children, and displaying a lack of integrity and/or common sense, for a sizeable number of people, however, is simply unacceptable regardless of the bigger payout.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrme_mgZKpA
ReplyDeleteLiberal boomers did this... as well create Microsoft and Apple.
How in God's name does the fact that "national IQ scores are correlated with GDP per capita" undermine HBD?
ReplyDeleteThis line was the funniest one of all and revealed the author's ignorance of the entire hbd movement. HBDers routinely cite global national income gaps as evidence of HBD (direction of causality = IQ -> national wealth), whether it is appropriate to do so or not. Certainly, it is no less appropriate than citing the reverse of this line of casuality, as our genius Erasmussimo did here.
I hope you're reading this mate.
He wrote:
ReplyDelete"I am willing to entertain the hypothesis that some men are born with lesser cognitive talents than others. If solid evidence arises that blacks are cognitively less capable than whites, then I shall accept the hypothesis..."
He is in the minority here. Government and the educational/indoctrination system will not pursue any research that might prove, or disprove, racial disparities.
Erasmussimo is definitely not Half Sigma.
ReplyDeletelol, it was a joke.
In response to Anonymous @ 1/12/13 10:53 PM
ReplyDeleteYou yourselves are idiots for ever having considered Racial Similartism in the first place. Few things are more obvious in this life than that Blacks (on average) are dumber/more dangerous than Jews
Lots of people have had limited contact with blacks and for a great many people, this is not an issue that they would think about in their daily life.
Who the hell cares if he "comes over" to "accepting the truth of HBD". As an adult who believes that blacks and chinamen are equally innately gifted at advanced maths he is clearly an embarassingly bad truth analyst.
People will tend to be poorer at analyzing things where they have an ideological stake in one side being true. Once that is removed, they likely will be better at analyzing truth on the issue.
Will "accepting HBD" make the world a better place? Did Hitler make the world a better place? Is China on the fast track to Eden?
I think that certain current policies would become untenable if HBD were widely accepted, so yes. As for Hitler and China, yes, both accept(ed) HBD, but I hardly think that this is the only difference between either and the current US. Accepting HBD would not make this the Garden of Eden, but ceteris paribus would probably improve public policy.
Recognizing the facts of humanbiodiveristy is cool because its true. That's it. Whether an HBD-aware society will have happier citizens than a superstitious one is anybody's guess.
There are superstitions that may be helpful to society ("opening an umbrella in the house is bad luck" has probably saved many an uncoordinated person from knocking over a lamp, and "walking under a ladder is bad luck" from bumping into a ladder and knocking someone off).
On the other hand, a superstition that, say, you should never do surgery during a full moon is likely to lead to the deaths of people whose need for emergency surgery coincides with the full moon.
Recognizing HBD is important because it would allow for a more honest discussion of policy. I think a society that is aware of the implications of HBD or of the problems associated with diversity will have more options for dealing with them.
One problem with allowing people to believe comforting lies:
ReplyDeleteIf all groups are equal, then you need a reason to explain the disparities of life. If there are fewer blacks running research labs at Columbia, then it is due to the unjustified prejudice of people who run things. African countries dysfunctional? Due to after effects of evil colonialism. Etc.
Then you are morally condemning and physically punishing innocent people for the sake of a pretty lie. Perfect justice is impossible here on Earth, but I think a society with more justice is better than one with more injustice.
I suspect that if Erasmussimo did turn to the Dark Enlightenment side he wouldn't speak out about it. The more common response is to go silent and keep your head down.
ReplyDeletere: Erasmussimo's Diaries
ReplyDeleteCurse you Steve Sailer for exposing me to Erasmussimo. I got out of the Ivy League after nine plus years during the Winter of 1974 with a terminal doctorate and post doc vowing never to return to its immersing hypocrisy, solipsistic students and professors, atmosphere of polylogism, and unending bull s**t.
Reading his diary and comments instantly transmitted me back in time to that milieu where everything is topsy turvy: brilliant minds being scrambled and nonsense being piled high and deep by self-satisfied psychotics.
I planned to get some work done today but instead I will watch the playoffs.
Thanks Steve.
Dan Kurt
p.s I really don't want or care to know who he is but I would wager he is the product of an Ivy League education.
There's an easy way to differentiate the scientific side of HBD from the racist side: fixation on IQ.
ReplyDeleteI don't think Erasmussimo has been following Steve's sports obsessions.
"Keep up the good work, I just donated."
ReplyDeleteSee, Steve?
(You did enter the right EBT card number, right jo?)
The idea that IQ is valid for complex urban societies but not for more primitive societies has no basis on reality. The chiefman is always somewhat smarter than the average tribesman. The stereotype "Take me to your chief!" is based on experience.
ReplyDeleteA few years from now:
ReplyDelete"Racism has a new name "biology"
Racism has a new name "Reason"
Racism has a new name "reality"
Having grown up on a farm myself, I've often thought that most of today's dumbest ideas could only have taken hold after most people moved into the cities and lost touch with nature.
ReplyDeleteWhat about Pol Pot? Wasn't he a farmer?
As I've said before, you (meaning 90% of the people who read this blog plus the author) might as well just say you're racist now. Look, you're going to be called racist anyway--you'd be called racist merely for being a Republican who lives in the suburbs, so it's pointless to contest the label. Just own it. Allow "racist" to include a broad swath of educated white professionals who believe there are racial (i.e. group) differences. What is the harm in that?
ReplyDeleteIt's jarring to me how many of my NYC friends have black nannies. You go to their kids' schools and it's all white and Asian parents and black and Hispanic nannies. Jarring not because there's anything wrong with it, but because they'd watch 100 movies set in the South where the white folks have black nannies (mammies) and it's considered racist and unacceptable, but when they do the same thing in NYC it's not the same thing. Sort of like how they'll read 100 article about mean Southerners locking up too many black kids and think one thing, but then they have no problem overlooking the incarceration rates in Harlem, the Bronx, all of Connecticut's cities, etc. The black nannies in NYC have one difference: they're almost all, as in 95%+, from Caribbean islands.
ReplyDeleteI've come across Erasmussimo's comments before and while he is unquestionably a sharp guy, as far as his HBD critique goes, he is simply an uninformed buffoon.
ReplyDeleteE.g., he is obviously unaware that blacks from highest income families score the same on SAT as whites
from families with lowest incomes.
I know who this kos guy is, but I don't know why Sailer is making a mystery of the thing, as the kos blogger has made the same arguments using his own name on a blog already mentioned here. If you can't find out who he is, you should probably slink away in embarrassment.
ReplyDelete"I had a long conversation with a lady with a doctorate on related stuff. I can't recall the label on her doctorate, but her research thesis involved DNA work. Anyway, she hadn't heard of "HBD" so she spent a few hours looking it over, and came up with a characterization that rings true for me. She sees a spectrum starting with evolutionary psychology, going through HBD, and ending in outright racism. She doesn't see anything wrong with evo psych, and some of the HBD stuff she saw was OK, but at the far end of the HBD range she found some scary stuff. She was particularly hard on Steve Sailor."
ReplyDeleteAt least he got your name right on the Kos blog.
"But of course, racism is always born of stupidity."
ReplyDeleteYes, that's why William Shockley and James Watson so qualify - because they were (are) stupid.
Reading that guy's contributions on Frost, it's pretty obvious that
ReplyDeletea) he's fairly new to all this
b) he's basically an honest guy
c) he's still at the phase of 'this is dynamite stuff, and must be used very carefully in formulating policy'. Later he'll discover that the only way it can be used is 'not at all', and that anyone attempting to use it, even a blogger making suggestions, is an evil racist.
But he knows he's not an evil racist, and he values scientific truth, so maybe he'll start making policy suggestions, and find that what happened to E.O. Wilson, H.J Eysenck et al happens to him, too. No more Kos columns!
Then he'll be 'one of us', and welcomed into the company of 'evil racists'. And all his old political allies will sigh and say 'he really went right-wing as he got older'.
Udolpho said:
ReplyDelete"Just own it. Allow "racist" to include a broad swath of educated white professionals who believe there are racial (i.e. group) differences. What is the harm in that?"
You would allow yourself to be defined by your enemies? That's very silly. Even by the OED, Steve would not want to embrace that definition, as it states that a racist thinks that "all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race". Only an idiot would subscribe to that view, because mean != all. Why not just hand your enemy a club to beat you with?
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/racism
"The fact that a presumably liberal author even considers that HBD could some day be scientifically demonstrated is simply amazing."
ReplyDeleteI think it was an inevitable consequence of offshoring and insourcing as that also transferred the western, specifically US, lead in science and technology. From that point they needed to be able to police East Asian science and academia as well as Western.
The potential benefits of being first and fastest in this field are so immense - especially in medicine imo - that now the technology has spread outside their control it will be unstoppable so from their point of view it's now more about falling back to a new defensive line.
(Hence the sudden rise of epigenetics.)
###
"Well, if you append "on average" before and after that phrase for clarification, then it's undoubtably true."
I think the problem for a certain kind of liberal is they have the idea there are black genes for intelligence and white genes for intelligence and therefore everything is fixed whereas they are the same genes with differing frequencies based on differing evolutionary histories.
Those frequences can be changed through cultural manipulation - only over generations maybe - but changed.
They're being changed for white people now except in the opposite direction through the promotion of maladaptive r-type behavior in the culture.
(Although this is disguised by the successfully targeted individuals mostly becoming submerged into the non-white underclass and so dropping out of the white average.)
It's important to distinguish between differences between individuals and between groups. You can believe that there are innate differences in intellectual ability, personality, etc., between people, but still not think that the observed differences between blacks and whites are innate. There are enough confounding variables that it's not so hard to imagine that these differences could be explained partly or wholly by those confounding variables. I don't think that's the way to bet, and my best guess is that most people who reach that conclusion given the available evidence are engaging in motivated reasoning, but it's not flat-earthism or creationism.
ReplyDeleteI'm one of his interested amateurs, but the evidence for innate differences in intelligence seem extremely strong to me, given twin and sibling adoption studies. And I definitely have seen big differences in personality and different talenfs between my own kids, despite shared environment and 50% shared genes. I find it very hard to see how those differences could not exist. By contrast, the evidence for innate racial differences is much messier--even when you have transracial adoption studies, you can't eliminate environmental differences based on being a different race.
I suspect having political and moral beliefs that cannot accomodate racial differences in intelligence or personality, for a smart science-oriented person today, is rather like having political and moral beliefs that cannot accomodate having the bookof Genesis not be literally true in the age of Darwin--it must make your stomach hurt every time you think about it.
What about Pol Pot? Wasn't he a farmer?
ReplyDeleteNo, Pol-Pot was Grande école-educated Marxist technocrat. The only thing that stood him apart from his French peers is that he got (and they didn't) to the position where their social engineering ideas could be implemented.
Udoplho said:
ReplyDelete"As I've said before, you (meaning 90% of the people who read this blog plus the author) might as well just say you're racist now. Look, you're going to be called racist anyway--you'd be called racist merely for being a Republican who lives in the suburbs, so it's pointless to contest the label."
The term racist (in current usage) implies that you actively hate other races. A lot of us don't actively hate other races. HBD doesn't need to lead to hatred of other races.
So it's better to substitute your own term like "race realism" or something, rather than saying you are racist.
I would wager he is the product of an Ivy League education
ReplyDeleteOn his website, he states that he attended state schools and holds degrees in a hard science subject.
I don't get the posts that are impressed with Erasmussimo's PC ranting just because he conceded (inconsistently) that genes have some influence on human traits. He's no better than the average Slate writer, who surely believes that there's something genetically special about his tribe/class/fellow travelers but will tar and blacklist anyone guilty of crimethink on race.
ReplyDeleteI dissected his comments at Frost(link at my blog), and they're all dreary 70s-era arguments. He spent an entire 20 minutes (documented) reading Sailer before deciding he was a criminal racist. Expecting that this 62 year old game designer with strident anti-racist views is going to evolve his thinking into HBD crimethought is extremely naive.
you're going to be called racist anyway
ReplyDeleteOf course whether you agree with the term depends on its definition.
In modern academia "racist" would probably denote anyone who believes that race is not merely a social construct but also has an underlying biological basis. The problem is that once the term is attached to you they'll also drag in cross-burning and Hitler.
You guys aren't getting it re: "racist". You can babble about your intentions and the nuances of your beliefs about race all you want. It doesn't matter. It will never matter. The instant you say that whites have higher average intelligence you will be considered racist by most people. You don't realize this because you make a point of not ever saying it to anyone but trustworthy HBD acquaintances. But you'd never blurt it out at a work-related happy hour, obviously.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's my point. Fear of being called racist has been more damaging than actually being called racist. Of course a lot of you are young and still living out your second childhood in academia, where people are hauled before inquisitions for crimethink. But it'a a big world outside the permastudent cocoon.
You are cooperating with leftists in building up "racist" to be the ultimate accusation by drawing distinctions that no leftist will ever acknowledge. The accusation only means something because everyone "knows" that racists are moronic, illiterate, cousin-fucking Southerners filled with irrational hatred. It's the main, perhaps only arrow in the leftist quiver, and by shrinking from the word you're helping it remain potent and effective.
The term racist (in current usage) implies that you actively hate other races. A lot of us don't actively hate other races. HBD doesn't need to lead to hatred of other races.
ReplyDeleteAt any particular time, the word "racist" means precisely what we need it to mean, and it can previously have meant, or can subsequently come to mean, whatever else we might need it to mean, at that particular time, in the past, or in the future.
All your word are belong to us.
MOO HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!
It would be really cool if you were able to convert some Kossacks, but I think you've got your work cut out for you.
ReplyDeletePart of the problem is that most people really just don't make connections the way we do. Look at this line:
"I fervently believe that 'All men are created equal', but I am willing to entertain the hypothesis that some men are born with lesser cognitive talents than others."
What the hell does he mean, he's "willing to entertain the hypothesis"? Hasn't he ever met someone with Down's syndrome? For all his yammering about "multiple intelligences", does he really think that someone born with microcephaly is as intelligent as a mathematician?
Well, no, of course not. He, like everyone else, knows perfectly well that cognitive differences aren't just a hypothesis. But you'd have to actually point that out to him, point-blank, to get him to actually think about it.
Take another example that I'm sure people around here have experienced. Several times, I have gotten into discussions with otherwise intelligent people who simply deny that blacks are more likely to commit crimes than whites. They'll blame the media or racism for making it SEEM that way, but they'll deny that it's actually true. The discussion usually goes like this:
"Well, you know that blacks are several times more likely to be VICTIMS of homicide than whites, right?"
Right. Of course.
"And you know that something like 90% of all homicides are intraracial, right?"
Yes, of course. Everyone knows that.
"So then, doesn't that HAVE to mean that black people are more likely to COMMIT homicide as well?"
Then they get it. That's all there is to it. Now, to you and me, this is an incredibly easy connection to make, but if I hadn't sat there and walked them through it, they would never have thought of it.
The problem is, nobody is going to make them sit there while we go through all the facts. Yet they've spent a lifetime sitting in classrooms being told about the connection between poverty and school performance, or the history of slavery and crime, but no one has ever actually sat there and spelled the IQ connection out to them. I think that for a lot of them, that's all it would really take, but it's just not very likely to ever happen.
I realize that this isn't exactly a groundbreaking insight, but it's just interesting to see in someone like Erasmussimo, who is apparently a reasonably intelligent guy.
Everyone knows this blog just seethes with hate. Look at all the wrinkles on Steve 'I hate Sailors. And gays' face, each one bred out hours of grimacing about the fact the Swedes are somewhat different then Nigerians.
ReplyDeleteI don't like to out anybody .... I try not to pass it on.
ReplyDeleteYou sound like the Godfather here, Steve. "I know who you are, buddy. But don't worry, I'm your friend."
The stereotype "Take me to your chief!" is based on experience.
ReplyDeleteArggh, J, when you're not flat out lying, you're uttering complete inanities. "Take me to your chief" is based on getting access to decision-makers, people with power, not because "experience" led anyone to believe chieftains were invariably the smartest guys in the room.
Erasmussimo makes much of the fact that there wouldn't be any evolutionary pressure for the development of "general mental ability". He should read David Geary's "The Origin of Mind":
ReplyDelete"The evolutionary function of fluid abilities is to support control-related problem solving. These mechanisms are designed to cope with the varied and often unpredictable nature of human social dynamics, specifically to simulate variation in these dynamics and to generate social and behavioral strategies that enable, if effective, better control of relationships and other resources. Crystallized intelligence results from the operation of gF as this facilitates the acquisition of biologically secondary competencies, such as reading, and from inherent individual differences in the modular systems."
Geoffrey Miller makes a similar argument in "The Mating Mind".
Look, you're going to be called racist anyway--you'd be called racist merely for being a Republican who lives in the suburbs, so it's pointless to contest the label. Just own it. Allow "racist" to include a broad swath of educated white professionals who believe there are racial (i.e. group) differences. What is the harm in that?
ReplyDeleteIt's not a bad point and I wish I could agree. I can't see it working though. "Racist" is just too useful as a term of opprobrium even to people are themselves (as per your definition) "racists." Racial facts are one thing and racial feelings another. We have all come across (I'm sure) people whose racial feelings run much stronger than our own. What more simple way to discredit or shut up such people than to call them racists? For example, I would say I'm one of the more racially intense commenters here but I too will use "racist" as a cheap way to discredit others further to the far white right than me. (I don't do it on the net cos it makes me sound hypocritical, but I definitely do it in real life.)
It's also a very handy term to attack white-hating blacks with -- so many people have had hairy experiences with wild, angry blacks that they can easily see your point.
Lastly, I have even found it useful in turning leftards "reasoning" back on them. You just find some area in which they are "intolerant" and call them "intolerant, judgmental, and racist." (Don't just say "racist" by itself, it won't work as well.) I said this to an annoying leftard but good-looking girl a couple weeks back when I caught her rejecting some guy trying to pick her up. She loves to criticize me for being disgusted by gay sex and she had flipped out at me recently because I cut off communication with a guy friend/acquaintance because I found out he was gay and hiding it from me. I said to her in mock criticism (but I made it sound serious) "Well, well, Claire, I cannot believe what I just saw. I can't believe how judgmental, intolerant, mean-spirited and racist you are. That guy just wanted to spread some love. So what if he creeped you out. We all know that's no excuse." She tried to dismiss it with a joke and started to say something else but I cut her off with "I don't think I can be friends with someone so intolerant, judgmental and racist. I really expected better from you" and walked off on her. A couple of hours later she tried talking to me again and I cut her off with "Have you stopped being intolerant, judgmental and racist yet? Then don't talk to me." I'm not claiming this converted her, but she certainly hasn't pestered me about gays since then. Sometimes, not being pestered by these morons is all that can be hoped for.
You might complain that what if they say "it's got nothing to do with race so how is it racist." That's why you include intolerant and judgmental too. If you do that in my experience they won't react to the fact that race has nothing to do with it. It's just how the mind makes associations and assigns hierarchies of importance in what to respond to. It's like when leftards try to scare you with "what about The Holocaust!" it's quite enough for them to just include the words "gas" and "ovens," regardless of whether they have anything to do with how gas or ovens were actually used. People hear "gas" or "oven" and their brains seize up. One could even say the Nazis herded Jews into "gas camps" and burned them in "concentration ovens" and not one in twenty people would attempt a correction because they were already quivering at the mere mention of "gas" and "oven."
If the guy is 62 years old, he clearly is too old to want to accept the reality of the situation. That's a long haul to believe that way for decades and then to suddenly turn and join the other side. If the guy is 62 yrs old, then I presume he was born around 1950, since few people born in 1951 have yet had their birthdays in the first two weeks of 2013. Smart people as they get older become more comfortable with their social circle, and this group will enforce believing the current dogma or else the apostate will risk ostracism from it. I remember hearing that the Thernstroms at Harvard were pretty much socially exiled by what they thought were their friends, because they dared to even venture into the center-right of this issue. Remember the Thernstroms are still adamantly anti human biodiversity, and yet that was still too much for a lot of their Boston area academic circle of friends.
ReplyDeleteThe same pressures apply to Pinker, I think he is just afraid of becoming Richard Herrnstein 2.0, so he just steers clear of discussing race whenever he can. Edward Wilson seems to have lost his will to fight as he has aged, he just avoids discussing the matter as well. The 60's generation has so stigmatized the study of this that most of the people who study this in academia are now pretty old, there are a lot less of them in the ensuing generations. This is why the people discussing it have moved onto the Web, that area is far less constricted by Political Correctness. The ideas of sociobiology have taken over zoology, but have been firewalled almost completely out of the social sciences, the tradition begun by Darwin and Galton may be dying out unfortunately at least as it applies to Homo sapiens.
I think erasmos has a point. A lot of hbd believers are racist. While hbd is not racist of itself, it strongly justifies racsist/chauvinist sentiment and there are credible reasons for this associations. We should be honest enough to note that neither the readers nor yourself Mr Sailer are dispassionate or severely scientific in your appreciation of this field. The D stands for differences, and a wholly subjective and nonscientific quantity as value cannot and should not be attached to the hbd field if it is to remain a cold rational observation and not the screen of rascists. Unfortunately we are all too human and cant hide our nature behind a scientific veneer such that sometimes our masks slip to reveal terrible malice. Such was the fate of Dr Lynn, who I name here as a racist. But who am I kidding, we know exactly what we are!
ReplyDeleteThe best reply to a supplicating, hypocritical SWPL or an enraged half-white pundit calling you racist, is "Whatever helps you sleep at night." Caustic dismissiveness and radical indifference is the kind of attitude you want to project. It's utterly demoralizing and discombobulating to your self-righteous enemies when you don't play into their frame, and instead force them into your own frame.
ReplyDeleteI think the "embrace the racism label" and "dodge the racism label" crowds are both wrong. When someone calls you a racist, you don't answer the charge, you return the favor: "that's racist!"; "you're a racist."
ReplyDeleteTrust me, if you've got your shit together, you can make it stick. If you can't, do your homework until you can.
You are the Inquisitor.
The dude at Frost's blog said his 'friend' looked into HBD, and she told him about it..."Erasmussimo" may be a dude's lesbian alter ego.
ReplyDeleteWhiskey said: "For example, the bonds of say, Portland OR, or Seattle WA, or BOISE ID, are likely pretty secure, while those of Detroit, or Baltimore, or Chicago are likely worthless...If you're smart, knowing Black run cities can't scrape up two cents"
ReplyDeleteI’m curious what Boise did to earn ALL CAPS. Knowing that black-run cities are poorly managed and making money from it are two different things. There have been numerous municipal bankruptcies (e.g. Alameda, CA) however I'd be surprised if a city like Detroit or Baltimore would be allowed to go bankrupt. That would be racist after all. The state would step in or if the city was connected enough (i.e. Chicago) possibly the Federal Gubbamint. Even in an instance like Alameda it’s not at all clear who will take the haircut (or wasn’t the last time I checked). Public sector unions certainly, but if the city has any hope of borrowing from the bond markets again, those haircuts will be small or non-existent. There may be some restructuring (fancy word by which your maturity gets pushed out or you get PIK interest for a bit).
Some states require debt service to come before ANY other spending. California's constitution requires this - making CA much less of a credit risk than you might think. Buying California general obligation munis is not particularly risky. CA has about 35mm people and a fairly large economy, something like the 6th or 7th largest in the world were it a stand-alone nation. If that economy was pointed entirely at debt service, they could handle it easily. Again, this isn’t to say that California isn’t governed almost entirely by lunatics (I lived there for 12 years, I can assure you that it is), just that betting on a CA default would most likely be a loser.
As is usually the case Whiskey, you've taken a common sense observation and extrapolated all sorts of nonsense from it.
There's a difference between the label "racist" as a word that means something, and one that is used as a magic word argument to stop the discussion.
ReplyDeleteFor the first one, the best answer I can think of is "okay, but is what I'm saying true?" That is, this may be a set of ideas commonly called racist, but the only real test of a set of ideas about the world is whether or not they're true, whether or not they tell you anything useful about the world.
For the second, the whole point of the label is so they can stop thinking. It's like someone calling you a communiist or a socialist (often for such far-left ideas as supporting a minimum wage or an inheritance tax)--they're not using the word to *mean* anything. They could as easily and usefully accuse you of witchcraft, devil worship, or being a space alien intent on enslaving mankind.
I think much of the time, if you're arguing in good faith and in a calm, fact-based way, this magic word stuff comes up because the person is finding themselves challenged uncomfortably by your arguments. They're looking for a reason they can give *themselves* to stop listening.
In other contexts, it's used as a magic word to shut you up by someone who simply wants to shut you up. In that case, they have no interest in whether you are a racist by any definition at all, anymore than AIPAC cares whether someone hostile to Israel's interests is really an anti-Semite or not. That's entirely beside the point.
"Whatever helps you sleep at night."
ReplyDeleteThat sounds dangerously libertarian.
"Caustic dismissiveness and radical indifference is the kind of attitude you want to project"
ReplyDeleteHey, it's worked pretty well for me!
For the first one, the best answer I can think of is "okay, but is what I'm saying true?"
ReplyDeleteThat only works with people motivated by a desire to uncover truth and who at the present moment incorrectly believe "anti-racists" are in possession of it. There are a relatively few such people out there. The vast majority of people are variously playing politics or engaging in ego-defense; both prefer happy (or at least manageable) lies to discomfiting truths.
Steve Sailor? Isn't he that guy who hangs out with Pat Buchannon?
ReplyDelete@anonymous - "The D stands for differences...."
ReplyDeleteno. the "D" stands for "diversity."
hbd=human biodiversity.
LBD: liberal bio-denial.
ReplyDeleteAnd I definitely have seen big differences in personality and different talents between my own kids, despite shared environment and 50% shared genes.
ReplyDeleteYour children share 60% of their genes with mice. I think that what you mean is that the genetic difference between any two of them is about 50% as great as the difference between you and their father.
The problem with HBDers is that when asked to produce scientific evidence to support their claims, they start reciting pseudoscitific creeds. Apparently, they don't understand the concept of science or the scientific method.
ReplyDeleteOr they'll start talking about IQ, which is malleable and, certainly, has not received consensus as proof of group differences in innate intelligence.
Then the HBDers will start spouting nonsense about the state of nations or regions and they'll mention the old standby, Detroit. I once replied to an HBDer that the Detroit reference was deeply flawed for a host of reasons. I also told him that Detroit was not the only black majority municipality. There are actually affluent, clean and orderly majority black areas throughout the United States. Which brings up another problem with HBD -- that is, they will ignore any piece of evidence that doesn't comport with their racist ideology while regurgitating the same ignorant junk over and over.