The always angry PZ Myers at Pharyngula is angry about Nicholas Wade's new book:
I considered reading his book, just to tear it up, but I don’t think it’s worth the effort, from the reviews ...
Fortunately, PZ has read the ever self-confident Noah Smith at Noahpinion, who is confident he knows all about it:
Here's how academic racism generally works. Suppose you see two groups that have an observable difference: for example, suppose you note that Hungary has a higher per capita income than Romania. Now you have a data point. To explain that data point, you come up with a theory: the Hungarian race is more industrious than the Romanian race. But suppose you notice that Romanians generally do better at gymnastics than Hungarians. To explain that second data point, you come up with a new piece of theory: The Romanian race must have some genes for gymnastics that the Hungarian race lacks.
You can keep doing this. Any time you see different average outcomes between two different groups, you can assume that there is a genetic basis for the difference. You can also tell "just-so stories" to back up each new assumption - for example, you might talk about how Hungarians are descended from steppe nomads who had to be industrious to survive, etc. etc. As new data arrive, you make more assumptions and more stories to explain them.
Of course, a dozen years ago, I was writing this. The state of the art in human biodiversity thought has progressed well past my first review in 2002 of Lynn and Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations, but the Myers and Smiths haven't caught up even with that.
Or here's my 17-year-old article that shows how to disentangle nature and nurture when it came to the complicated data involving Olympic running.
Nobody ever said that figuring out what part is nature and what part is nurture is easy: that's why it's the Big Leagues of intellectual life.
Or here's my 17-year-old article that shows how to disentangle nature and nurture when it came to the complicated data involving Olympic running.
Nobody ever said that figuring out what part is nature and what part is nurture is easy: that's why it's the Big Leagues of intellectual life.
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83 comments:
The anger is roughly equivalent to the anger Puritans felt at Quaker grannies preaching in Boston, for which said grannie was hanged.
Diversity and Multiculturalism (along with Global Warming) is a religion. Don't think the Puritan culture just is without any religion. They have the same form, but not the substance, as doom-and-gloom Ragnorak inspired Christianity.
All men are absolutely equal in a brotherhood of SWPL. Everyone is the same, except straight White guys outside the group, who must be exterminated! Gay and Black, and Black gays, are the exalted holy spirit in action! Mother Earth is dying because of the original sin of White guy technology. And other such hoo-hah garbage that in another Age, Mark Twain ridiculed as superstitious nonsense.
Diversity, PC, Multiculturalism are religons. People depend on them to live their daily lives. Its like telling Aztecs the sun will come up tomorrow without human sacrifice. They just won't believe it. And figure you are the next sacrifice.
As new evidence and information arrives about HBD you can create new assumptions and make us new just-so-stories for why it is wrong and why you simply want to bury your head in the sand.
""""""""The state of the art in human biodiversity thought has progressed well past my first review in 2002 of Lynn and Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations, but the Myers and Smiths haven't caught up even with that."""""""""
But are PZ and Noah actual scientists? Besides commentary and playing the race card like its the bottom of the 9th inning of the seventh game at the World Series of Poker Tournament (or is it now Texas Hold'em, where you mostly rely on bluffing?), what else do messieurs PZ and Noah do? If they are not scientists, but mostly card players (and bluffers) well,....they don't help to make the case very well of credentialed scientists who may not like Wade's conclusions, do they? They're probably more than a bit embarrassed each time these opinion makers open their keyboards and spew out their ignorance.
And if they actually are scientists, why aren't they relying on actual evidence from a scientific point of view?
Yet one more example of channelling Gould via seance. The instructions they were given quite simply is to ad hominem and name call away.
Whilst the legitimate scientists are face palming a la Homer DOH! and imploring them to go away since it makes them look like buffoons just being associated with cloddish clowns such as these.
Steve,
Why nothing on the new WWT?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/conchita-wurst-how-a-bearded-drag-pervert-reviled-by-russia-became-the-toast-of-europe-9350504.html
This seems to trot out all the epithets, like Transphobic and Homophobic and has the bonus that it likens the Russians to troglodytes or something.
In the comments section of his science blog, PZ says he believes that race exists.
PZ says:
"Race does not exist? Where have I ever argued that, you delusional crank?"
So he believes in race. That's progress, i think. Here is a 2006 article in which he thinks race is only a social construct.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/04/22/that-question-of-race/
PZ said:
"My position on the issue is Richard Lewontin’s."
Proving the existence of race is the biggest hurdle. It's not much of a leap to then say that differences exist.
Here's how academic racism generally works. Suppose you see two groups that have an observable difference: for example, suppose you note that Hungary has a higher per capita income than Romania. Now you have a data point. To explain that data point, you come up with a theory: the Hungarian race is more industrious than the Romanian race. But suppose you notice that Romanians generally do better at gymnastics than Hungarians. To explain that second data point, you come up with a new piece of theory: The Romanian race must have some genes for gymnastics that the Hungarian race lacks.
Nobody does this. (Or is it nobodies does this?)
Some guy looks at sports that blacks dominate and then decides that blacks dominate all sports.
I never really read ol' PZ's blog, but I remember browsing it a few times when Vox Day or some other conservative blogger was on the warpath against him. PZ struck me as utterly insufferable.
Myers is a pretentious buffoon. His blog gained success by picking the low-hanging fruit of ridiculing fundamentalist creationism. It's something he honed his ability at by teaching elementary science courses to Minnesota hicks at a state school in the middle of nowhere. Too bad H.L. Mencken did it a lot better 100 years ago.
Tackling the implications of evolution on society is beyond him. It would require considering that evolution doesn't support the reigning PC consensus that the academic world slavishly adheres to.
He reminds me of a passage from a book by Art De Vany, an economics professor who was the early advocates of the Paleo approach to health (and probably the most physically imposing 77 year old alive):
"I made the rounds among my anthropologist colleagues at the institute to discuss this and what I should read on the subject. I found it ironic that these people who knew so much about hunter-gatherers all ate a high-carb diet. Many of the scholars were overweight. I thought, if they know so much about the human mind and its evolution, why are they so heavy? I think they separated their knowledge of science from their personal habits, as many epople seem to do but gave little thought to what they ate."
I was actually introduced to Sailer's blog through health blogger John Durant, who has a fascinating chapter in his book about how religious mores evolved as a response to the transmission of pathogens. Coming off of Wade's book, and previously reading of old-time pop evolution writers like E.O. Wilson and Desmond Morris I'd love to read something that ties together all the non-PC implications of evolution (health, sexual behavior, family life, politics, social organization). "Mean Genes" by Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan looks like a good candidate...
Here's how academic anti-racism generally works. Suppose you see two groups that have an observable difference: for example, suppose you note that Blacks run faster than Jews. Now you have a data point. To explain that data point, you come up with a theory: It's the white man's fault--legacy of slavery.
But suppose you notice that Jews do better at math than blacks. To explain that second data point, you come up with the same piece of theory: It's the white man's fault--legacy of antisemitism.
Nobody comes up with a theory that Romanians and Hungarians have some genetic tustle over gymnast genes.
When you begin to look at Sprinting the ordinary man sees that black sprinters dominate the 100-200-400. Obviously there is a genetic component to this. Same with East Africans and the long distance running. Swimming is another sport that has obvious genetic component.
Look at the ingenious inventions of Europeans and Asians by contrast. Yeah sure, there's no difference.
this book was written by Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Alfred Rosenberg a long time ago.
it’s called “the myth of the blood”, or as Rosenberg called it “Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts”. the idea is that culture is an epiphenomenon of the blood. it’s the very first in the national socialist creed.
i remember Rosenberg trying to explain away Germany’s retarded/late development compared to that of Greece and Rome. it was bs then and now.
he should have remembered the slogan “blut und boden”. it’s not just “blut”.
today a country less than 250 years old wants to tell Persia what to do. most of white America’s ancestors were greasy illiterate human sacrifice practicers when Xerxes the Great was beaten at Themopylae.
evolution is not that quick. not even close.
at that time nw europeans had the potential, but it would be impossible to tell by looking at them.
mongolians have the biggest heads of any people. apparently they haven’t been using them.
Nobody ever said that figuring out what part is nature and what part is nurture is easy: that's why it's the Big Leagues of intellectual life.
i apologize, but this betrays a common misconception.
even herr professor doktor steve hsu doesn't understand the concept of
norms of reaction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norms_of_reaction
as steve jones said to speak of genes and environment as additive is to speak nonsense, yet this additive model is exactly what behavioral "genetics" is enamored of.
"it's impossible to slice the cake. one needs to unbake the cake."
that is the function which takes one genome and its environment to such and such traits is not aG + bE. this is only an approximation which is valid for a narrow range of environments and genomes.
and one sees exactly this when the MZA data is disaggregated. that is when on quantifies "apart", one finds that the correlation for various psychological traits almost vanishes for those twins who were actually raised apart.
He say's he's a godless liberal.
But his god is clearly equality and his Holy Spirit is the belief that Africa can produce a highly organized stable and desirable civil society without whites or Asians.
Dipsticks like PZ take the virtues of fair play, altruism and caring and transfer them to vice. It's amazing that a writer who looks at biology and thinks evolution is the best explanation, cannot grasp the reality that blacks really are dimmer than whites. That Asians are slightly brighter than whites and that some subsets of the white populations in Europe and the US are off the charts genius. Then there's the Hebrews.
The cultural Marxist left increasingly doesn't even try to address opposing views any longer. They just denounce adversaries as "racists/homophobes/sexists/other designated victim group du jour-ists" and then declare victory.
It's like debating with especially spoiled and self-satisfied children used to having their own way.
Steve, I was doing some reading on correlation and I was surprised by how little information is actually captured by correlation coefficients. It doesn't tell you about the magnitude of variation, only the direction of variation. It doesn't account for scale either. For instance, for X axis of 100,100.1,100.4,100.6,100.8,101 and y axis of 1000,9999,99999,100001,100002,1000000 - the correlation coefficient is still 0.72.
To their credit, the IQ and Wealth of Nations authors used some regression analysis as well, but it leaves much to be desired.
I think a good way to estimate the influence of nature vs nurture would be to compare IQ in North and South Korea. Lynn's data is not useful because he just averaged SK, Japan and China to get NK's score. Per capita GDP differences between the Koreas are already known. If the IQs are the same, then culture alone is capable of producing tenfold differences in GDP.
If the IQs are lower in the North, then we may have some proof that bad culture and malnutrition depresses IQs.
If anything, NK should have had higher IQ than SK in 1950, if the fashionable theories of Northern people having higher IQs because they need to prepare for harsher winters is true. Plus NK was the more industrialized half at that time.
But are PZ and Noah actual scientists?
No. PZ has scientific training but he is not a practicing scientist. He last published something of his own 20 years ago, in 1993. His publication record is absolutely pathetic (10 papers in total, only half of them as first or last author). He rides tenure gravy train in a crap school that offers no value to taxpayers who fund it.
You need transgender sensitivity training, Steve!
The meta question I have is why liberals spend so much more time enforcing taboos on research about group differences than they do engaging with you on how to help the left half of the bell curve. You could easily argue that the taboos have illiberal effects, regardless of their intent. It's like it's ok to have tens of millions of Americans consigned to multigenerational poverty as long as we all pretend that the next school reform will be the magic bullet that frees them.
A few years ago I heard about PZ's blog, went there, and couldn't believe what the hell I was reading from a guy who supposedly knows something of evolution.
His posters seemed to be primarily made up of what I think are his students, sycophants, really.
Beyond that, it seemed the primary purpose of the blog was to provide a platform for the blogger and his posters to bash those who practice religion, believe in a God.
I wondered why a biologist and someone purportedly interested in evolution didn't turn his interest toward discovering evolutionary/genetic underpinnings of belief in God instead of engaging in teenagerish sarcasm.
He seems to be a rather hateful guy, esp when he finds out he's been wrong about something.
Why do people who choose science as their life's work behave so anti-sciency (yeah, new word.)
Guess it must really frost him that a liberal like Wade wrote that race exists, that there are behavioral differences between racial groups, and mostly, I think he sees the handwriting on the wall about race and Iq.
What will the followers of guys like Myers do when it all comes tumbling down? I mean, I'm already a senior citizen, but a lot of these folks are pretty young and they will live to see the day when the blank slaters and the ditzy anthropologists will be likened to the Inquisitors of the Dark Ages.
@corn - " PZ struck me as utterly insufferable."
yeah. that he is. *facepalm*
PZ must have been some kind of actual scientist at some point. He's better known these days for the atheism+ war in the atheist/skeptic community. I'm not really sure who's winning but the skeptic/atheist community has been under the assault of social justice feminists and one of the leaders of that army is PZ Myers.
He's not worth paying attention to imho unless he's relaying unsubstantiated rape rumors. He's been doing a lot of that lately. He's a despicable platyhelminth.
Here's how academic racism generally works.
The feminists call that "mansplaining".
Where some male blowhard decides to authoritatively lecture the boys and girls about how they should look at the world.
Rifleman said...
Here's how academic racism generally works.
The feminists call that "mansplaining".
Where some male blowhard decides to authoritatively lecture the boys and girls about how they should look at the world.
===
It gets worse than that.
PZ Myers and his crew think being rude is a virtue and that people who call for polite discussion are pretty much politically motivated "tone police".
They call free speech "freeze peach" in a deriding manner.
They're far gone into the nether regions of academic intersectional theory.
The book violates the religion of Political Correctness. Wade is lucky we don't have jail time for Hate Thoughts. Yet.
I see a reader calling himself "cockfart" has made some reasonable arguments on the site (despite his moniker) and that they have been completely censored. Only his moniker remains; the comments themselves have been deleted. The Left really loves free discussion and debate, don't they? The only reason I know this guy's arguments are reasonable is because they are quoted by some people arguing fatuously against him.
"[debating with the Left] ... is like debating with especially spoiled and self-satisfied children used to having their own way."
Quite. I recently saw a clip from the Bill Maher show in which the libertarian Nick Gillespie very calmly and matter-of-factly argued to Rachel Maddow that Fast and Furious was in fact an Obama administration misdeed that should not be swept under the rug and not a Republican conspiracy theory. It was very illuminating to observe Ms. Maddow immediately become flustered and exasperated, aggressively accusing Gillespie of being "angry". Pure projection. She couldn't take not being in her usual echo chamber. Frankly, I know nothing about the topic discussed but it was fascinating and frightening from a psychological point of view to observe the workings of the leftist mind.
evolution is not that quick. not even close.
Sigh. Another blow-hard.
Talk to Greg Cochran some day.
I bet PZ Myers's genes are more similar to those of academic racists' than the genes of people who are uninterested in HBD from any standpoint.
People involving themselves in the subject of HBD from either perspective are doing so because they are 'difficult', not because they are cleverer. Most people and most scientists just muddle along with the recieved wisdom, which is that disparate impact means discrimination, case closed. That is the settled opinion of the establishment in the West, because most people are not going to go against recieved wisdom.
Mr Sailer,
At the "angry" link, Myers calls you a "racist ignoramus". And after all of your efforts to play nice, eg not identify as a White Nationalist. Schade.
West African genes are good for short distance sprints, there is no other way to explain it. For those that do not believe its the genes, please offer your theories.
"evolution is not that quick. not even close"
You are confusing human history time scales with evolutionary time scales. If you want to discuss the Persians and evolution look at their DNA history.
"evolution is not that quick. not even close."
This is such stupid drivel.
Hello, can you say dog breeds. Tame foxes, etc.
It doesn't take a million years for selection to work. Hell, a nasty plague can select in a matter of months.
If the British had decided to exterminate the inhabitants of Africa instead of just colonize there, how many Africans would there be in the next generation? That is right, zero.
We all know how relentlessly folks like PZ Myers push birth control and abortion to blacks and "the poor" aka dumb. Obviously they want fewer of them and they know that the fewer kids they have the fewer there will be in the future. Their camp tried to forced sterilization route back in the day, but that scandalized society, so they have retreated to the religious devotion of Planned Parenthood. They just don't think they can get rid of so many folks they dislike if they come out against them. I mean seriously, who is more likely to get a dumb girl to the clinic, someone who tells her she is too stupid to breed or someone who tells her she is brave and strong and the best thing for her to do is not have a baby now but focus more on herself.
The PZ Meyers crowd (mostly) know what they are doing.
"The meta question I have is why liberals spend so much more time enforcing taboos on research about group differences than they do engaging with you on how to help the left half of the bell curve."
I wrote "How to Help the Left Half of the Bell Curve" back in 2000.
http://www.isteve.com/How_to_Help_the_Left_Half_of_the_Bell_Curve.htm
It's pretty depressing to Google "help the left half of the bell curve" and see how popular the concept has become over the last 14 years.
Maybe it's because I was adopted by good people of average intelligence that the notion that the bright should look out for the not so bright strikes me as a good idea, but it doesn't appeal to many other people.
"hugh lygon said...
today a country less than 250 years old wants to tell Persia what to do. most of white America’s ancestors were greasy illiterate human sacrifice practicers when Xerxes the Great was beaten at Themopylae."
Are you really that stupid?
How many Persians from the time of Xerxes were literate? Do you maintain that Xerxes' empire was a well of humanitarianism? It was customary for the newly crowned persian emperor to have all of his brothers garroted. I would even guess that a good number of Persians of that era were "greasy".
Perhaps you really are as stupid as you seem.
PZ Myers is either an insufferable liar or an insufferable nitwit.
@ Dave Pinsen (5/11/14, 10:37 PM) --
> The meta question I have is why liberals spend so much more time enforcing taboos on research about group differences than they do engaging with you [Sailer] on how to help the left half of the bell curve. You could easily argue that the taboos have illiberal effects, regardless of their intent...
Great question. Along the lines of Mencius Moldbug's musings, here are some quotes from Joseph Bottum's recent lecture, The Post-Protestant Ethic and Spirit of America.
--- begin fair-use extract ---
The new elite class of America is the old one: America’s mainline Protestant Christians in both the glory and the annoyingness of their moral confidence and spiritual certainty. They just stripped out the Christianity along the way...
[Post-Protestants'] deepest awareness of sin... derives from their sense of a shadowy evil that lies over the past, and over much of the present as well. The language of sin and redemption is a Christian one, of course, and thus part of what these post-Protestants have explicitly left behind, but it’s hard to know what other vocabulary will convey exactly how members of this new class understand reality, for anxious they truly are. A need to see themselves as good people... compels them in deeply significant ways.
In their view, the world is filled with malignant social forces [that] have a palpable metaphysical presence in the world. And the post-Protestants believe that the best way to know themselves as moral is to define themselves in opposition to such bigotry and oppression, understanding good and evil not primarily in terms of personal behavior, but as states of mind about the social condition.
Sin, in other words, appears as a social fact and the redeemed personality becomes confident of its own salvation by being aware of that fact, by knowing about and rejecting the evil that darkens society.
--- end fair-use extract ---
Expressing one's rage towards unrepentant sinners -- a very natural, very human response to the provocations offered by the likes of Wade and Sailer.
And meta, too. In his discussion of the evolution of humans away from the joint human-chimp ancestor, Wade touches upon changes in the ways that "we" define out-groups, and how "we" respond to "them." (I don't have the book to hand, so no page references, sorry.)
"...most of white America’s ancestors were greasy illiterate human sacrifice practicers when Xerxes the Great was beaten at Themopylae..."
Perhaps, but most Persians were downtrodden peasants when Santa Ana was beaten at the Alamo.
--!!!
Here's how academic racism generally works: Genuflect to "diversity" and intimate how our skin color is a proxy for vague inherent substantive differences -- jene se quoi. Make sure that these differences are never named nor discussed, but are used to justify affirmative discrimination.
The diversity supremists like to claim there are inherent substantive differences between races when it justifies minority benefits. Then they turn around and claim that disparities in group outcomes between races are illegitimate because there are no inherent differences between races.
To explain that data point, you come up with a theory: the Hungarian race is more industrious than the Romanian race. But suppose you notice that Romanians generally do better at gymnastics than Hungarians.
The thing that makes this a terrible analogy is that the Romanians "doing better at gymnastics" (as measured by gym competitions) is not necessarily a good measure of the entire population, but a means of selecting from that average.
(Like certain posters on iSteve who talk a lot about the International Mathematical Olympiad... ).
If there were nationally administered tests of gymnastic ability, and the national average, considering all persons, in Romania was better than Hungary, then yes, you'd have a completely sound basis for beginning to pursue a theory about how this was genetic in basis.
And you would be right to test this, and generate theories as to why this was. You'd have a sound beginning for a basis.
But of course, this by itself would not generally be enough to make it worth the effort, not enough to overcome our skepticism and build grand castles in the air.
What would make it worth the effort, was if we had huge heritability studies within populations indicating that gymnastic ability and practice and focus was strongly, strongly predicted by parental genetics.
Which we have for most of the interesting traits which HBD generally begins to build theories for. General personality variables, general intelligence variables, broad intelligence facets.
(Or, even better, if we had genetic studies linking specific genes to traits and evidence they differed between populations.)
Noah Smith misunderstands the basis of the observations that lead to theories of genetic population differences - a) they come on the back of these differences being demonstrated to exist in randomly selected subsets of the populations and b) they are made on the basis of sound evidence that these differences are genetic within population (and that therefore it is more complicated to *NOT* assume that the between population differences are genetic).
If he cannot make this discrimination, then he has no basis to comment.
Ok, then I will assume that neither PZ nor Noah are legitimate scientists, or at least not on par with Nicholas Wade. Nature and Science generally don't publish cretins, frauds, or fakes.
It will be interesting to see whom the NYT enlists to officially critique Wade's book (if it has not been done already) and obviously, to keep their reputation intact, they will have to commission a legitimately credentialed scientist (obviously on par with Wade) to critique A Troublesome Inheritance.
Wade is no longer with the NYT, which is a plus for their science coverage
I was an undergraduate when Phillippe Rushton came out with his nonsense about Blacks having large penises and small brains versus Asians having small penises and large brains. I was at York University in Toronto at the time, and will never forget one of my teachers saying that White supremacy never changes — it just juggles who is at the top of the racial hierarchy. So true.
Yeah, what is a race? Are African-Americans still the same race as Africans? After all a significant percentage of them have European and/or Native American ancestry. For that matter are an Oromo and a Zulu the same race? They both come from Africa, but you can see physical differences between them. My ancestors are all various breeds of white folks, but are they the same race? They wouldn’t have been perceived as so by some people in previous eras
what gets me about all racist racial logic is how they always take some characteristic that is easily seen like appearance skin color, eye shape hair and then make some causal connection with behavior (or is a correlation) with success in the current civilization mostly it seems as a justification of why US got da money or big guns.
In talking with some of them it seems like they think somehow current knowledge is inherited through our genes and not learned. That it does not take the same abilities and talents to survive and thrive for the poor and uneducated as well as the rich and privileged. In fact a case could be made that it takes greater skill to survive and pass-on your genes if you are poor then if you inherited wealth and power in the current ruling classes. The other factor that is never taken into consideration is the deep time involved in real genetic change in populations.
just so stories indeed!
We should carefully preserve every word PZ writes, so that, comes the revolution, they can be used as an instructive reminder of the dishonesty and bad faith of much of the flat-earth position on race.
I foresee his and his ilk's being recognized as the 21st century's equivalent of Father Furniss. (Note: no endorsement implied.)
The thing is, if differences in IQ were related to things that could be fixed or compensated for e.g. iodine deficiency, then those fixes can't be attempted because the PC religion won't admit the differences exist.
Two audio recordings of possible interest are linked in PZ Myers' thread.
From commenter Jennifer Raff, an hour-long podcast that's a discussion between A.T.I. author Nicholas Wade and anthropologist Agustin Fuentes, moderated by American Anthropological Association Executive Director Edward Lebow. Link for streaming and download.
From commenter Efrem Zecarias, a 20-minute interview by the host of CBC's "Day 6 with Brent Bambury" of Nicholas Wade, as well as critic and Stanford medical anthropologist Duana Fullwiley. Link to page hosting playback.
Steve, you were adopted? I've been reading you for ten years or so, and I'm pretty sure I didn't know that.
these Libbies love to masturHate.
"Maybe it's because I was adopted by good people of average intelligence that the notion that the bright should look out for the not so bright strikes me as a good idea"
I don't know. Maybe the lesson in Sailer's case is that it's better for bright people to be looked out for by less bright people.
Btw, the notion that the best and brightest should look out for the People....
Isn't that what progs insist they stand for?
"evolution is not that quick. not even close."
Evolution can be very very slow. Some species have hardly changed in 100 million yrs. Look at alligators.
But it can also be relatively very speedy.
If all the world become covered with ice and we lost all our technology, Eskimos will outlive most of us. Natural selection will work very fast.
How come no one made an argument that it's oppressive to ride horses?
It's horse rape, I tell ya.
"Maybe it's because I was adopted by good people of average intelligence that the notion that the bright should look out for the not so bright strikes me as a good idea"
Steve, "adopted by good people of average intelligence"? "Average"?
Didn't your dad design in the aerospace industry? No person of average intelligence does that.
Please explain.
Strong 3-d intelligence, not strong verbal. He wasn't a designer of new planes, he tended to get inglorious jobs trying to keep the glamor guys' designs from killing so many pilots (e.g., the F-104) while they went on to design the SR-71 and the like.
Judging by his tweets, Noah Smith must be borderline retarded. Just another Jew who enjoys an undeserved reputation, possessing what Matt Taibbi called "emboldened stupidity" in reference to (Thomas Friedman).
Maybe it's because I was adopted by good people of average intelligence that the notion that the bright should look out for the not so bright strikes me as a good idea, but it doesn't appeal to many other people.
Or maybe you're just an all round nice person, unlike many other people.
That it does not take the same abilities and talents to survive and thrive for the poor and uneducated as well as the rich and privileged. In fact a case could be made that it takes greater skill to survive and pass-on your genes if you are poor then if you inherited wealth and power in the current ruling classes.
Why do you act like this is some kind of "gotcha"? That idea is the basic idea behind higher intelligences developing in colder climates. When it was difficult to survive, intelligence was selected for. In tropical areas where food was plentiful and easy to get, it wasn't selected for as strongly.
Why do you think it makes you look smart to criticize theories you clearly know nothing about?
PZ Myers is the Dana Carvey's Churchladyof biology teachers.
The boy has that prissy, passive aggressive creepiness about him.
Some one should investigate the genetic component in White people like him that cause this tendency.
Maybe the Chinese, or renegade Western researchers in China will.
I like how PC Myers calls his blog a "free thought" blog while allowing absolutely no dissent in the comment section. Black is white, white is black, and we have always been at war with Oceania.
I had no idea you were adopted, Steve.
And it's a laudable tenet that the not so bright should be taken care of by the bright.
What do you think of Cass Sunstein's libertarian paternalism? Nudging seems to appeal to the British Conservative Party, which I think is gradually growing closer to the American Alt Right than the US republicans are.
They also appointed Nassim Nicholas Taleb as their economic adviser, and he supported Ron Paul here.
Meanwhile, I'd love to see some hypothesizing or data from you on the two Koreas and IQ. I got the idea from Scott Alexander's blog, where he used it to claim that it was an experiment showing liberalism produces good outcomes. But I'm not sure that's the right conclusion to be drawn from it.
The feminists call that "mansplaining".
German feminists have a better play on words for that: Herrklaeren. I wonder which came first, the German or Anglo version.
"Supremacy"
"Juggles who is at the top of the hierarchy"
One of these does not belong.
Steve's "Race FAQ" addresses a lot of this.
"the notion that the bright should look out for the not so bright strikes me as a good idea, but it doesn't appeal to many other people."
It used to. Part of what's gone wrong is that the people who most believed in that were persuaded to worry about the outermost circle of need rather than the innermost with disastrous result.
Since your dad was in the airplane industry have you ever read An American Saga. It's the story of Juan Trippe and Pan Am. It's an interesting book.
Why do you act like this is some kind of "gotcha"? That idea is the basic idea behind higher intelligences developing in colder climates. When it was difficult to survive, intelligence was selected for. In tropical areas where food was plentiful and easy to get, it wasn't selected for as strongly.
I suspect it was difficult to survive in both areas. Cold climates offered sparser edible vegetation to gather and small animals to hunt. Warm climates had a higher density of plants and animals to consume, but also had a higher density of large predators. As a result, people in cold climates had to struggle against the elements, but there was less of a minute-to-minute danger from large predators, whereas people in warm climates had to worry about animal attacks all the time. That may account for the stick-to-itiveness of people from the northern climates, whereas excessive concentration on a single task might have been fatal in warmer climates.
My ancestors are all various breeds of white folks, but are they the same race? They wouldn’t have been perceived as so by some people in previous eras
So if you were forced to choose between living in a white ghetto and a black ghetto you'd be completely indifferent, right? Right? Rofl.
Your dad not having a high verbal doesn't mean he was of "average intelligence," Steve. It's obvious he much above average.
Did you happen to grow interested in adoption and twin studies because you were adopted?
Presumably, but my attitude has always been: Well, why wouldn't somebody be interested in twin and adoption studies? Fiction, myth, movies, they've got a million versions of twin and adoption angles (e.g., "I am your father, Luke"), so, if you have any kind of scientific and statistical bent, why wouldn't you be interested in twin and adoption studies?
Steve Sailer said...
Maybe it's because I was adopted by good people of average intelligence that the notion that the bright should look out for the not so bright strikes me as a good idea, but it doesn't appeal to many other people.
Jesus H Christ, whether the reason is because a person is smart, Christian, or just good mannered( well brought up), this is just THE RIGHT THING TO DO.
You see it Steve, but millions don't/won't.
MT Isa Miner
greasy illiterate human sacrifice practicers when Xerxes the Great was beaten at Themopylae
... and that's just the Persians, Greeks and Jews.
(Kidding. They didn't practice human sacrifice. Although there was that documentary with Gerard Butler about the Greeks kicking people into pits, and some ancient Greeks did say some stuff about Persians and live burial.)
The ancestors of the majority of white americans were northwestern europeans and they indeed practiced human sacrifice before romanization.
In his History of the English Speaking People Winston Churchill talks about the widespread practice of human sacrifice among the celtic Druids of Britain. In his book Germania the Roman author Tacitus wrote about human sacrifice among the the germanic barbarians.
"I was an undergraduate when Phillippe Rushton came out with his nonsense about Blacks having large penises and small brains versus Asians having small penises and large brains. I was at York University in Toronto at the time, and will never forget one of my teachers saying that White supremacy never changes — it just juggles who is at the top of the racial hierarchy. So true."
He says it's nonsense and therefore, it is nonsense.
Such logic.
I was an undergraduate when Phillippe Rushton came out with his nonsense about Blacks having large penises and small brains versus Asians having small penises and large brains. I was at York University in Toronto at the time, and will never forget one of my teachers saying that White supremacy never changes — it just juggles who is at the top of the racial hierarchy. So true.
Obviously makes no sense.
Yeah, what is a race? Are African-Americans still the same race as Africans? After all a significant percentage of them have European and/or Native American ancestry. For that matter are an Oromo and a Zulu the same race? They both come from Africa, but you can see physical differences between them. My ancestors are all various breeds of white folks, but are they the same race? They wouldn’t have been perceived as so by some people in previous eras
Anti-racist makes refusing to read a virtue.
Steve's "Race FAQ" addresses a lot of this.
If they wanted to learn, they'd learn first, and run their mouths second. They want to preen, then go back to their sheltered ignorance. "Anti-racists" are almost never familiar with what they're opposing. When they become familiar, they fade away, never to be seen again. They suddenly find much more important (much safer) things to think about.
In fact a case could be made that it takes greater skill to survive and pass-on your genes if you are poor then if you inherited wealth and power in the current ruling classes. The other factor that is never taken into consideration is the deep time involved in real genetic change in populations.
just so stories indeed!
Anti-racist doesn't understand that wealth passed on is stored accomplishment.
I suspect it was difficult to survive in both areas. Cold climates offered sparser edible vegetation to gather and small animals to hunt. Warm climates had a higher density of plants and animals to consume, but also had a higher density of large predators. As a result, people in cold climates had to struggle against the elements, but there was less of a minute-to-minute danger from large predators, whereas people in warm climates had to worry about animal attacks all the time. That may account for the stick-to-itiveness of people from the northern climates, whereas excessive concentration on a single task might have been fatal in warmer climates.
1) Future orientation. "Winter is coming"
2) Cooperation. Might make the difference between surviving and starving.
Upthread (5/12/14, 9:42 AM), I mentioned two audio interviews of Wade. I've listened to Brent Bambury's ten minutes with Wade and ten minutes with critic Diana Fullwiley on CBC Radio. Bambury was a fair albeit superficial interviewer.
Re: the second half: These days, it seems that the highest compliment one could pay to a public intellectual would be to exclaim, "You're so unlike Richard Feynman!"
Fullwiley is wily in her denunciations of Wade. She communicates clearly that he's wrong on the science... it's just the details of exactly where he's wrong (and where he is right) that are left a wee bit murky. Her words are crafted to mean something different to a lay listener than to somebody trained in genetics.
For instance, Fullwiley defeats Wade's argument that there are only three races by pointing out that genetic variability and evolution have been detected within smaller human populations. Take that, strawman!
To get intelligent, intelligible reviews, Wade would have needed to have restricted A.T.I. to a few of the most basic points covered in Steve's Race FAQ.
Of course, then he wouldn't have written a book. He would have copied parts of a FAQ.
Ah, the glories of learned stupidity, put to the service of correct doctrine.
The worship of Baal involved the sacrifice of the first-born child.
Something to bear in mind.
The ancestors of the majority of white americans were northwestern europeans and they indeed practiced human sacrifice before romanization.
Still on your obsessive anti-white people kick? The ancestors of all people were other people who practiced human sacrifice.
A tidbit on Wade, via Razib Khan (GNXP) at Unz Review. He took a buyout from the NYT in December 2011, according to a contemporaneous NY Observer article.
"technically" the greeks were defeated at thermopylae, yes.
and hey i'm 100% nw european as far as i know, actually just british isles with a little french and swiss, but one of my ggg... grandfathers was born in madrid. my surname is swiss. like steve's, from the canton for which switzerland is named no less.
and my family published the baltimore catechism.
but whatever. my point was that looking back one finds that
1. the putatively inferior were often superior.
2. the putatively superior were often inferior. ans that includes the jews. ancient israel compared to ancient greece? there is no comparison.
3. very seldom mentioned is the recentness of racial explanations for material/technical/cultural level. st. augustine probably looked like gaddafi.
The incredible shrinking PZ Myers! He's still far too relevant but his star is fading fast.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58P788ngFCA#t=714
The whole video is a suitable intro to the recent drama in the skeptic/atheist community.
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