"The more I read, the more I like my Rock, Paper, Scissors metaphor for describing the state of the argument."
Your Scissors category doesn't accurately describe the position. E.g., Steve Sailer (leading proponent of "race realism"): Treat Americans as individuals, but acknowledge that heredity & culture explain differences in average outcomes by race.
If you don't recognize the underlying causes, you will perpetually look to fix problems in unrealistic ways because most people, as you say, "intuitively find inequality offensive," and believe it requires a solution (and that it necessarily *has* a solution, which we just haven't discovered).
You should host a conversation with Sailer. It sticks out like a sore thumb that you never even mention, let alone engage with, him. (PS: He's a really nice guy, you might enjoy it.)
Steve says two things that individualists wouldn’t like:
1) HBD should play a strong role in immigration policy
2) HBD should play a strong role in foriegn policy
The bell curve made a similar statement about #1 and didn’t discuss #2 at all.
I feel like immigration is just going to be the big fault line here. This “treat people as individuals” thing seems fine enough when your high iq ethnic majority is secure, but it kind of seems insane when your importing a new majority of hostile low iq ethnics.
But as Bryan Caplan would say, those people are all individuals too and citizenship is just as arbitrary as race is it not.
If we assume legal immigration (ha ha but bear with me), Rocks could just give applicants IQ tests, say the ASVAB. That's treating people as individuals, from purely practical perspective it's trivial to do, there would be no need for any contentious lumping or splitting, and it would achieve most of what Steve wants from a HBD-aware immigration policy.
The first has nothing to do with social science, the second is dogma, and the third is thinly disguised racial essentialism. I reject all, in favor of the approach taken here:
"the third is thinly disguised racial essentialism"
No. That's BS and you know it. Realism is not racism. Realism is not essentialism. Realism is merely saying "the statistical distributions of any feature between human population groups or the sexes will tend to overlap but the means and standard deviations of those distributions can differ and sometimes to a significant degree."
Your claim about disguised animus is exactly the kind of typical smear the left tries to deploy to avoid the mountain of evidence - to win the argument by dirty tricks instead of, you know, argument. As a common social judgment it makes it completely impossible for anyone to present a contrary case in a fair and rigorous manner without knee-jerk categorization of them of a bigot and the permanent ruination of their public reputation to great personal risk and expense. It is completely incompatible with a healthy intellectual culture of open, quality discourse.
Arnold is disappointingly not living up to his presumption against "asymmetric insight" in liking this comment, since this is a canonical example of ad hominem, not engaging on the merits, claiming that one's opponents have secret evil motives, and that their arguments and evidence don't have to be countered and can all be ignored because they are all just lies that thinly veil those motives.
I asked nicely, and I'll ask nicely again. Please explain the axiom in your own words. And, if you are willing to put in some extra effort, to explain why one must follow such an axiom. Just yesterday in that discussion about philosophy, Arnold joked about ideas that couldn't be easily and accurately summarized. Is that what we're dealing with here?
After accusing me of knowingly spreading BS, engaging in smears and dirty tricks and ad hominem attacks about secret evil motives, etc. and accusing Arnold of endorsing this.
I did not respond in kind. This is not the kind of interaction that appeals to me.
I rejected all three perspectives, not just the one you are defending, and provided links to explain why. I have nothing more to add.
I'm sorry I really don't have time for this, if the references aren't helpful just ignore them. You may also want to look at the subtitle of Glenn's memoir, out in April, if you think his views are left wing. I have a blurb on the book in case that's of any interest.
I'm fairly certain that Handle is pretty familiar with Loury's work and that he's encountered the ideas before. If you want to have a dialogue it would be best to summarize the axiom here so there was something to discuss.
Right. I'm very familiar with all that - Loury's been trying to sell this nonsense for years - you may have noticed it hasn't gone anywhere, because it's not worthy of getting anywhere.
This is all pretty embarrassing on Rajiv's part in my opinion, and tellingly so. I wasn't asking him to do anything hard, just stop "arguing from famous name" and lay out the idea in plain language.
Here, let me do it for Rajiv. "When you see a racial disparity, in your effort to explain that disparity, only look for non-genetic explanations."
This is the intellectual equivalent of "the axiom of Calvinball" - "Oh, you say I'm losing because down on points? How about I change the normal rules and three-point shots count as zero? Now, I'm winning!"
If you don't believe me, here is Loury in his own words, "Anti-essentialism is a related notion, and I'm saying, "There's inequality between these racial groups." And one way to account for it would just be to say that they are different, that some people came from Africa, some people came from Northern Europe, some people came from Northeast Asia. These populations are essentially different, different in their genetic makeup in ways that bear on social outcomes. And while that could be true, it's a scientific claim, it's a scientific claim, for the sake of my argument, I was assuming that it was not true. And I'm getting criticized for making that assumption by some developmental and psychologists who study the heritability of human intelligence, because they want to question whether or not the claim is true. I'm not addressing the biology of race, I'm saying for the sake of my argument, I'm going to try to explain racial inequality without reference to essential disparity."
What he's saying is, I'm not making the kind of argument that qualifies as a reliable argument about empirical reality, cause it might go into inconvenient or uncomfortable truth territory. I'm just gonna avoid that whole badland minefield and restrict myself solely to the pleasant and popular meadows of pretty lies. He isn't fooling anybody who doesn't already really want to go along with this nonsense. For a so-called "intellectual", this kind of thing is frankly ridiculous.
Loury was getting criticized because he was taking a whole set of strongly-evidenced and compelling explanations completely off the table because ... uh ... reasons. Cause if you disagree with my special-case argument rules, you're a bad person. When people asked him in what other realm of empirical inquiry does anyone ever apply such special axioms or rules, he couldn't come up with anything, because, duh, that's not how things work.
I think Handle has assumed too much by Kling's "Like" but he is exactly right to complain about "thinly disguised racial essentialism." As I have no idea how to access Loury's intro and preface without getting the book, I had to use Google to get a better idea on essentialism. If it does indeed focus on the innate, that's not the same as a realism that includes culture. Note that a racial essentialist could be a realist but a realist does not have to be an essentialist.
It's possible I assumed too much, and if so I deserve Arnold's harsh correction and clarification should he wish to provide one (it's his place, he has every right to do whatever he wants.) I also admit that who 'likes' which comments is a petty thing to get worked up about. I found it surprisingly out of character; I would have expected a line like that to have spoiled the 'likability' of the comment.
I suspect there is a disconnect in meaning and intention here. On the one hand there is the perfectly reasonable position, "One should not *immediately jump* to genetic causes, *to the exclusion* of environmental causes, every time one is trying to explain some new observation of a major disparity between ethnic groups." That's fine, at least, so long as it is paired with "Likewise, one should not *immediately dismiss* genetic causes and dogmatically insist that all big, bad disparities are mostly environmental."
I think Loury and those like him are trying to smuggle in a *different* position, but under the guise of the reasonable one above. The position that one should *only* look for non-genetic explanations, and perhaps only propose or accept genetic explanations reluctantly and in desperation as a last resort when all other attempts have failed, is very distinct from the one above.
For one thing, as experience of decades and millions of examples have taught us, the non-genetic explanations quickly migrate to unfalsifiable territory where no one ever has to admit they fail. And if they haven't 'failed' anyone who proposes or accepts genetic explanations for anything is doing so not reluctantly, but, because 'prematurely', intentionally, i.e. they are a bad evil bigot moron hater, etc., etc. and you shouldn't listen to them, or even allow them to speak in a place where others could listen to them.
This is "Loury's axiom". It is of course no 'axiom' but just an arbitrary rule of ideological constraint on epistemic investigation which in practice operates as a thumb on the scale ensuring the the only possible conclusions one can draw are politically correct, but alas, not factually correct. Stripped of its purportedly nice intentions, it is just a new version of "'Shut Up!' he explained."
My guess is that someone who is in the favor of the former position is very tempted to support the second position, because, given how the second position is expressed in a confusing and misleading way, it's very easy to mistake it for the same thing. But it's not. The reason I ask people to express these ideas in their own, simple words is because, when you pull the sheepskin off, whoops, turns out it's a wolf.
Arnold, you have a number of people in your comments section who both subscribe to racial essentialism in their view of the world, and seem to object to being called racial essentialists, considering this to be an insult. They misunderstand and mischaracterize Glenn Loury's objection to this view of the world. I have no wish to engage with them any further, but would like to explain to you why I find this position objectionable on both scientific and moral grounds.
I'll do so with a simple example taken form a recent paper with Dan O'Flaherty, link below, extract follows:
"The State of Mississippi adopted a new constitution in 1890 that identified the conditions under which a citizen would be permitted to vote:
\begin{quote}
Every male inhabitant of this State, except idiots, insane persons and Indians not taxed, who is a citizen of the United States, twenty-one years old and upwards, who has resided in this State two years... and who has never been convicted of bribery, burglary, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretenses, perjury, forgery, embezzlement or bigamy, and who has paid... all taxes which may have been legally required of him... is declared to be a qualified elector.
\end{quote}
The list of crimes here is striking for what it excludes. Murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, all violent felonies that today carry the harshest sentences, were not considered disqualifying. The reasons for this were subsequently explained by the Mississippi Supreme Court in the 1896 case Ratliff v. Beale as follows:
\begin{quote}
It is in the highest degree improbable that there was not a consistent, controlling directing purpose governing the convention by which these schemes were elaborated and fixed in the constitution. Within the field of permissible action under the limitations imposed by the federal constitution, the convention swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race. By reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependence, this race had acquired or accentuated certain peculiarities of habit, of temperament, and of character, which clearly distinguished it as a race from that of the whites,---a patient, docile people, but careless, landless, and migratory within narrow limits, without forethought, and its criminal members given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites. Restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone.
\end{quote}
That is, the rationale for stripping rights from those who had committed “furtive” crimes while declining to do so for those convicted of more serious and violent offenses was to selectively disenfranchise African American men, who had won the right to vote by 1869 under the 14th and 15th amendments to the United States constitution. Unable to exclude this group by name, the framers of the Mississippi constitution chose instead to rely on stereotypes that were prevalent at the time. By careful curation of exclusionary criteria, they “swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise.” And this was stated baldly and approvingly by the Mississippi Supreme Court itself."
The racial essentialists of the 19th century considered whites to be more inclined to commit "robust" crimes like robbery and murder, and less inclined to commit "furtive" crimes like fraud and embezzlement. The racial essentialists of today see things differently, they see whites as less inclined to commit the robust crimes. Both are reasoning from correlations, assuming causal linkages where none can be proved to exist. Loury's view, which I share, is that this is scientifically lazy and morally repugnant.
While certainly (inadvertently?) generous to the "racial essentialists of the 19th century" for their supposed belief that the more indefensible, lethal crimes were the sole province of whites, I am not sure how to square the assertion with Mississippi's withholding of gun rights from freedmen, in that same period.
Of course, once guns became widely available to all - after about 1910? 1915? - that quaint notion you describe (if true) was put to rest.
Arnold wrote "The problem with realism (Scissors) is that it uncages the demon of racial stereotyping and prejudice." There is no good reason why that should be so. To anyone not stupid there is no connection between a group average and any particular individual. For example, there are roughly 40 million blacks in America. Even though they average a standard deviation, or 15 points below the norm, there are still a great many (around 6 million) who are smarter than the average white. I am fortunate to have been acquainted some extremely bright blacks. It's a matter of simple math that they represent a much lower percentage of their group than high IQ persons of groups with higher averages, but they do exist.
We shouldn't deny realism just because some might try to improperly seize on it to support their specious beliefs. The Left's devotion to identity politics blinds them to the fact that the group average says nothing about any individual. They are the ones committed to racial essentialism, not the realists or individualists.
Imagine the line, "The problem with realism is that it uncages the demon of people believing that the sexes are really different in lots of ways and then - get this - acting in accordance with those accurate beliefs."
The "every stance has a weakness" seems like sneaky language to me.
When someone says, "This argument has a weakness" they never mean, "This argument uses logic and evidence in a valid, rigorous way and comes to a conclusion which is accurate, however, lots of people really don't like that conclusion."
See the word game here? A "rational weakness" in an argument's validity or accuracy is a completely different matter than the "political weakness" of a truth's unpopularity.
Ugly truths are unpopular, duh! That's the Orwellian joke behind "Hate-facts". Now we can add "Weak-Truths". Good grief.
Unfortunately it is not at all difficult to imagine. In fact, I am positively certain that some such lines have been written in books on -isms by prestigious modern American intellectuals. Poe's Law strikes again! As for genetic/biological factors causing men to be more violent, they are passed over in silence as being both embarrassing to bring up in the light of other group differences (same happens with dog and cat breeds, by the way) and too obvious to mention. People a generation or two out may no longer "get the joke" and believe sincerely (to the extent that one can talk of "believing" - cf. doxastic voluntarism - and "sincerity" - see Randall Collins - in these matters) that it's all socioeconomic factors.
This hits the nail on the head. We already know there are genetic/biological factors that lead men to be more violent, and yet no one has a problem treating men as individuals.
We also don't have a problem with limited discrimination against men (women-only gyms).
And while more recently people have been questioning whether the legal system is unfair to men in some ways, no one is under the delusion that we need to pretend men aren't more violent in order to fix that unfairness.
I think you hit on the exact problem. "Race realism" isn't wrong inherently, but what people do with the information varies, and drifts into bad territory quickly. I have argued with self defined race realists claiming that since blacks are lower IQ on average they will never be as successful as whites and so will be a limitless sources of social conflict, and therefore must be expelled from the country, with the corollary that all nation-states must be mono-ethnic states. Even putting aside the... well everything there... it never seems to occur to them that the problem is that people find infinite ways of dividing themselves into groups, and so there will always be group differences, and the only practical way to deal with the situation is treating people as individuals. That's the point of doing that: it stops the infinite regress of ever smaller groups.
You act as if your treating others like individuals means they will return the favor, rather then pocket your concession and gang up on you as a group.
You act as if there is a practical alternative to treating individuals as individuals, or that doing so is a "concession." One doesn't treat their wife based on her group membership after all. One might start from a broad group membership approach when they know very little about a person, but as they learn more they focus on the reality of the individual. To do otherwise is madness, and would result in e.g. treating your wife as though she were the average for her race and sex, and not a particular person. Or her refusing to share a room with you because she should treat you as she would the average man. Presuming she hasn't slept with the average man, that is.
Of course all of that is beside the point I was making in my post you responded to, but what can you do.
I think the issue is that people with strong aesthetic preferences for Rock would rather lose beautifully then win with the slightest stain of impurity.
The Bell Curve *could* be used in a manner to deny individualism, therefore it must be rejected.
In fact one could easily argue it should! The Bell Curve itself noted that the IQ of immigrants should be taken into account in immigration policy, and of course immigration policy being a national policy is going to have to engage in some "lumping". It's not possible to split public policy all the way down to the individual on every issue.
There is no doubt at least one innocent person in Bukele's jails, and yet everyone seems to think that treating people with tattoos as a hostile race that is guilty until proven innocent is mostly a good thing. He won ugly, some people would rather lose in buetifal purity.
If we assume legal immigration (ha ha but bear with me), Rocks could just give applicants IQ tests, say the ASVAB. From purely practical perspective it's trivial to do, and there would be no need for any contentious lumping or splitting.
Ultimately, any system of merit based immigration, besides needing to stop illegal immigration, is also going to run face to face with family re-unification.
Let's say you have a smart third world computer programer. He's got a wife and a cousin and a nephew. They are going to have cousins and nieces too, etc. He's going to have kids one day who revert to the mean, etc.
What we find in practice in the first world is that we get chain migration. It's just very hard not to unless you are going to have people live in dormitories are second class citizens on temp visas that get cycled back every five years, and most high IQ productive people aren't going to put up with that.
It could be done in theory, but in practice it's just very difficult to say "no". The sob stories write themselves and the immigrants, who are citizens with rights and votes now, have a strong incentive to push policy in that direction.
Perhaps LKY had that iron in him but western democracies do not.
Yes, that is a good point about family reunification. However, not that long ago immigration did not used to be run that way in western democracies, so the problem seems to be with the lack of counterweight to the sentimentalism which makes sob stories work politically rather than western culture or democracy as such. E.g. I gather (I have not studied this in detail so any of this may be wrong; please correct me if so) that there was no such thing as family reunification in the Ellis Island period: you could bring your wife and children over only if you could prove you could support them and even then they had to pass muster at the immigration counter. Men came alone, worked and saved for many years in order to be able to bring their immediate family over. They routinely spent a decade or so as non-voting aliens, assimilating to the American way of life, before they were allowed to naturalize, and for that they had to have behaved and acquitted themselves reasonably well. The strong pressure to assimilate, together with the earnest desire of most immigrants to become Americans, combined with American individualism to reduce the problem of voting for more relatives to be allowed to come over. Japan's skilled immigration policy is run on similar lines today. They do have the temp visas cycled every five years thing, too, but that is for menial labor and these are not allowed to bring even their immediate family.
The problem is there are no rocks on the left - the left has a clear aesthetic preference for "the lump" that is the criminal underclass. Rap music, most obviously. You mention tattoos. I think of this whenever I see a picture of some degenerate, as I did just the other day, when my husband who has a little bit of a hate-addiction to CNN, said, "Oh, they found that little girl" [her body] and I didn't know about any little girl and looked it up, and there is her murderer entirely covered in tattoos. Which is exactly the aesthetic the left celebrates; given a choice between two pictured dudes, tattoo-announcing lowlife or cleancut and employable, and they will choose the former every time.
No they won’t, only when they personally aren’t hurt, or lose money. This is exactly a luxury belief aesthetic. See who they choose as neighbors whenever the college educated Dems move, it’s always to the least tattooed neighborhood near their job that they can afford.
You’d have a long search, in many locales, to find an American woman not tattooed in the manner of - the kind of dude in prison for rape//murder of women. This is too commonplace to not include many fairly normal women, some of my friends even, back when my friends tended to be people I worked with. Not to mention virtually all Hollywood actresses, etc.
Sure, it’s still a class marker, to an extent - but it is the unmarked who are the irrelevant and vanishing class.
It does depend a bit on the place. Tattoos have become very common, but then in upper middle class areas they are still pretty rare (or easily covered up.) It is mostly the under 30 crowd that seems to have a lot that are foolishly visible, and the lower class.
I wonder if tattoo removal businesses are a good business investment going forward :D Even my young kids look at most young people with tattoos today and comment on how ugly they are.
I was being sarcastic (that's what /s means, in case you don't know). My point was that this particular belief is actually very costly for its holders and imposes real hardships such as ridiculous commutes in bad traffic, and can only be called a luxury belief in the sense that far from everybody can afford it. It is not in any way like a Gucci bag or a Lambo.
Your three categories mix two different things 1) What is the world like? 2) What is a good society?
It is perfectly possible to morally believe everyone should wind up in the same place even if they contribute way different amounts, even is some are stupid and lazy and some smart and hard working. But people generally aren't willing to bite that bullet. They kinda sorta believe all good things go together; everyone is actually essentially equal so in a good society everyone will wind up in similar places, at least there will be no racial/ethnic differences.
The solution is a synthesis of the three. They all have something to add, but any one taken in exclusion of the others becomes problematic. An analogy is the philosophical debate between universalism and nominalism. The modern West came to a place where each has its place and neither is taken to an extreme. Today the whole nominalism/universalism debate seems absurd to most of us, and that is where this race debate needs to end up as well.
What would policies based on a synthesis of the three look like? Would people be treated as individuals or as representatives of their respective groups? If some combination of the two, what would that look like?
Just common-sense stuff, removing the extremes of thought on all sides. There should not be any race-based legal codes. Real racial discrimination should be discouraged by law. Simple average outcome difference should not alone be considered evidence of discrimination. And overall race should have much less of a role in our conversations and debates than it currently does.
There needs to be an acknowledgement that real group unfairness exists. Both in historical terms, leading to differing cultural patterns, as well as overt discrimination on the individual level (less common today than in the past, fortunately). Not all of the racial gaps are genetic. Pure individualism sounds like saying “let’s just move on,” which will not be psychologically sufficient to move us out of the current rut. And no, I don’t claim to have all the answers for how to make this synthesis happen.
"You are factually correct, but politically incorrect, so you lose," provides no possible basis for a synthesis. Acknowledgements of truths are good but only work if they are reciprocal and go both ways, but they don't.
I generally agree, but the term “group unfairness” bothers me if by it you mean unfairness by a group. Collectives are theoretical groupings by arbitrary characteristics. Theoretical groupings can’t act, only individuals can. When individuals are unfair, that should be reported, condemned, and, if illegal, prosecuted. But the sins of one person are not the sins of the groups to which he belongs.
There is nothing “arbitrary” about “black people” as a group. That’s a very obvious shelling point for coordinated political, social, and cultural action. They don’t all vote 90% democrat because all of thy ‘em decided as individuals that it was best for the country. They asked “what’s the best party for us blacks” and that was the answer most coordinated on.
You may wish that black and bridge player are both equally arbitrary groupings, but you know it’s not true.
This is an empirical question not a philosophical one.
It sort of circles back to the age old (and as I said earlier, mostly absurd) philosophical debate about universals. You have to be careful not to treat them too concretely, but you also can’t just reject them. As far as I can tell a purely rational treatment of the question always ends unsatisfactorily, but from a practical standpoint it works just fine.
LKY is the most explicit advocate of HBD in real world governance and you can go see what he said and what he did for examples.
A key piece of LKYs insight is that you need a dominant majority ethnic group with enough solidarity to keep political control. If you don’t have that society will inevitably descend into racial gangs preying on one another. This is why he crafted Singapores immigration policy to keep the Han a firm majority and worked to keep the Han based pap the dominant party.
Having established this han dominance LKY took actions to try and integrate the different groups together (in education, language, public service, housing , etc) while also offering each group its own private spaces if the my respected singapores laws and customs.
The bell curve and Steve sailer also offer suggestions.
This is a great insight, I'm impressed. I would like to elaborate with some of my own thoughts. I'm going to use Hughes, Kendi, and Cofnas as stand-ins for the three approaches.
1. Kendi "beats" Hughes in the sense that he makes claims about the world and Hughes has to respond by refuting them. This means Hughes is playing an ongoing game of whack-a-mole. Kendi can also claim to be pursuing a better world while Hughes seems to be supporting the status quo, and the former is more emotionally compelling.
2. Cofnas beating Kendi is similar in the sense that Cofnas is playing offense and Kendi is playing defense. Cofnas makes arguments for his position and it's difficult for Kendi to refute them. Kendi has to either engage in a debate he cannot win or refuse to debate. He can try to shut down Cofnas with stigma, but this isn't going to work on every "race realist" all the time - there will always be people making claims that are difficult for Kendi to respond to.
3. Hughes has a valuable weapon against Cofnas - pragmatism. Rather than addressing the arguments themselves, he can point out that Cofnas' ideas are impractical as a path forward for society overall and for the anti-woke movement.
I think individualism is the best approach, but if Kendism has enough power it's a tough opponent to deal with.
In the game of Rock Paper Scissors, the only way to assure losing is for your opponent to always know what your going to play, which if you only play the same thing all the time they will.
Steve Sailer had a line that once Scissor was banned from the Overton Window, it was inevitable that Rock would become the new Far Right.
Rock can't really survive the game unless Paper is afraid of Scissor.
If we were to get more nuanced, different situations call for different strategies. Treating people as individuals depends on the context and whether that is possible or desirable compared to the alternative. If I was forced to write an essay I would talk about Underwriting Costs and the practicality of Splitting versus Lumping.
Bukele doesn't treat people with gang tattoos as individuals, but as a kind of inherent criminal race guilty until proven innocent. And people love it.
Similarly, I would pose that on immigration in general Rock has just fumbled. Most situations where its pragmatic reality makes is difficult to treat people as individuals are very difficult for Rock to take the right actions.
If I were to give Paper its due, America probably could tolerate some level of make-work for blacks to keep the peace provided it didn't expand beyond them or turn into a permanent agitation state, but that's how it went down.
I think most Scissors people like Rock, they just see it getting taken to town by Paper too often.
The root of the problem is that it's very easy to persuade people who belong to readily identifiable groups which do not do well with Rock relative to others to take Paper. Envy and a sort of primitive sub-Dunbar sense of justice (these may actually be very closely related) are powerful feelings, whereas Mt 18:6 is not preached much lately. As a result, there is no shortage of (as Jerry Pournelle put it once) slick talkers willing to say it's all a plot. If one crop of them gets a vision and starts promoting Rock, social market forces will soon produce a new crop that will thrive on promoting Paper. Apparently it takes complicated social technology to suppress this phenomenon to harmless levels.
To add, such readily identifiable groups need not be long established or derive from previously well known categorizations of reality. It is enough that they be sufficiently obvious and readily identifiable to all concerned; the ensuing dynamic is the same. Here is a recent example. For 4 or 5 months the previous autumn and winter, we had massive load shedding for reasons not germane to this discussion. The utility company serving the city where I live split household electricity consumers into three groups, put up a rolling schedule, and at any given time one to two groups (depending on how severe extraneously imposed power constraints happened to be on a given day) were unpowered. Technically this meant switching off power delivery to last mile substations, each serving on the order of 10,000 households and regular consumer-oriented businesses such as grocery shops. Certain critical facilities such as hospitals, sewage pumping stations, communications hubs, the subway and so on were not unpowered, which was reasonable, easily understood by everyone and uncontroversial. Now the intention was to have the groups approximately equal in size, and from what I saw this was done as closely as reasonably possible without large changes in pre-existing wiring. However, Soviet and especially post-Soviet construction was a hap-hazard business in practice and builders sometimes connected new apartment blocks to whatever last-mile electrical distribution points happened to be most convenient, rather than what rules prescribed, and quite a number of apartment blocks ended up wired together with hospitals, phone exchanges and other such critical facilities. Nobody except electricians had any idea that this was the case, or would have cared a bent nickel about it, but once load shedding kicked in, it became glaringly obvious: every night these apartment blocks stood out shining in a lake of darkness and faint portable LED lights. This instantly created _readily identifiable groups_, and soon there was much bad blood about it, with people loudly demanding on social media that all such apartment blocks be somehow cut off and reconnected so that they'd sit in the dark like their neighbors. It was hardly reasonable to demand costly utility works for such a trivial reason and to castigate the inhabitants of those apartment blocks as if they were responsible for having ended up with their lights on, but there it was. It did not help that people had well founded suspicions that, at least initially, certain upscale neighborhoods were exempt for reasons unrelated to the realities of on-the-ground electrical infrastructure, and even when all such instances were discovered and eliminated, with at least a fraction of noisy people it proved impossible to persuade them that there was no behind-the-scenes play involved, that the reasons were really technical, and that the situation could not be corrected (if it could even be said to have been _wrong_ before) in a hurry just so that some people wouldn't have easy targets for envious vituperation. The majority of people accepted the situation as it was, whether from stoicism, fatalism, or perforce, but it did not improve anyone's digestion. I confess to having had to suppress stirrings of envy myself when I looked out of my dark windows. Fortunately, as long as relevant authorities can afford to ignore it, social media are the perfect relief valve for people most prone to such vituperation, and (despite hopes entertained in some quarters) nothing bad came of it except some ulcers, but one should remember that the cause was extremely trivial compared to ones being discussed in the OP post and comments.
Please, please, please do not use an acronym unless it is well-known to your audience. If you are commenting on a stock market blog, you can assume everyone there knows that SEC is the Security and Exchange Commission. Perhaps I am obtuse but I did not know what RIM means and after reading your comment still do not. Nothing at Acronym Finder seemed to fit.
> The root of the problem is that it's very easy to persuade people who belong to readily identifiable groups
> RIGs
I introduced it to avoid tedious repetition. Perhaps I am too used to technical writing where new notation is introduced whenever it seems to be called for. I will edit the comment to eliminate it.
Great Rock, Paper, Scissors metaphor about the race debate.
We need changes so that every American who behaves well, even with low IQ, can achieve the American Dream: an education, a house, a family, a job that can support a family. Not committing crimes, not being hassled by police while enjoying legal life. This is likely the goal of those who are Rock individualists, and Scissors race realists, and possibly even close to the Paper equalitarians’ publicly stated goals.
“All men are created equal”. Yes, in the eyes of God, and all with human dignity and deserving of respect. Each individual is different – and different is never equal.
Thus, similar behavior in terms of effort will still result in different outcomes, based on different talent and environment, not merely on effort.
The success sequence works for low, medium & high IQ folk, based primarily on behavior, not IQ: graduate HS/ GED; no kids before marriage; get & keep a job; no criminal convictions.
Society does an inconsistent job at providing an education; we can force students to sit in chairs but we can’t make them learn. But the current “college only,” or mostly, as the goal of K-12, is failing many of the avg students not going to college, and is failing most of the low IQ students, those at 100 down to about the 70-75 IQ level, the “Intellectual Disability” level.
It’s excellent that Cofnas and other race realists are expanding the debate about race, and the false idea that races are equal in all important ways. We need more truth, and pushback against lies. Cofnas provides the strongest critique of the equalitarian foundation, “all are equal, therefore unequal outcomes are because of racism.” For getting the measured outcomes—degrees, marriages, wages, prison terms – the group aggregates are sums of the individuals, whose results depend on both behavior and genetic talents/ gifts/ privileges. In particular, marriages & prison terms depend far more on non-genetic behaviors, lousy Black culture. Degrees, and wages in a knowledge economy, have a bigger IQ/ genetic component.
The equalitarians falsely blame structural racism for results that are based on genes & parents, plus sub-optimal environment (SES), plus bad behavior – free will. The almost total failure of these equalitarians to judge individuals based on the behavior of those moral agents inevitably leads to worse behavior. Bad behavior, from oppressors or oppressed people, leads to bad results.
But race realism and anti-equalitarianism is somewhat missing a related, even more fundament unwanted truth: Life is not fair. People want life to be fair, “equal chances”, but high/low is not fair:
IQ, beauty, athletic talent; having 2 parents, being born in the USA – all of these huge advantages are undeserved luck. The existence of these unfair advantages is not an injustice. Unfair is not always unjust, and the desire for “cosmic justice” cannot be satisfied in reality. Real morality is based on activities chosen by the people who make the choice. There are no actions that equalize ugly and attractive people which are moral; no moral actions to equalize high & low IQ people.
Society needs an answer to Lenin’s always relevant question: “What is to be Done?” Falsely blaming systemic racism or whiteness doesn’t help more low IQ blacks achieve a middle class American Dream. Nor low IQ whites.
How do low IQ white men live and achieve a version of the American Dream? They get low status jobs, low but steady wages, less attractive women as wives. They might drink a bit much, play video too much, or take more drugs than is good – but get to work and pay their bills consistently. They’re buying a small house or condo in a cheap area, with a mediocre or below average school district school; or a trailer; or live in some rental place. This same behavior is available for black men, but far fewer choose these responsible behaviors. Lack of self-discipline in a person is an individual failure, not a social failure.
How much help should society be giving, not as a right, but as a civilization benefit, to the black folk in society, or low IQ folk? “Nothing” is far too little. So much AA that it destroys civilization is too much – tho it might be that the lying about “equality” is worse than the current anti-white racism.
The power of the equalitarians is that they’re proposing actions to solve the problem of racial group inequality, which seems more hopeful and virtuous than govt/ social neutrality, even if the hopes will always be dashed, in practice. Just like socialism. This is the Paper that wins the emotions over those hard hearted privileged Rock individualists.
In poor areas, black and white and Hispanic, there should be more govt rewards for finishing HS, for getting married before having a baby, for keeping a job for over a year, for not getting convicted of any crimes. There should be a govt based Job Guarantee. These are more carrots, rather than any negative incentive sticks.
The hard truth that equalitarianism is false, that humans can never create cosmic justice, needs to be joined with a generous program that helps incentivize better behavior among the poor so that any willing to behave well will have the expectation of achieving their American Dream, with greater measurable success than in the last few years.
"The problem with individualism (Rock) is that people intuitively find inequality offensive. If we treat people as individuals, and the resulting outcomes are unequal by race, this will not be acceptable. The unequal outcomes will be viewed as a sign that something is wrong with our society.”
I don’t think most people believe this. It’s certainly not intuitive. Only an “intellectual” or wannabe could believe this, probably rooted in envy. The notion that fairness must be judged by outcomes rather than individual rights is a recent development in academia which has spread only to its unthinking, status seeking acolytes. Most people want equal rights, not equal outcomes.
Ther is not conflict with individualism and Equalitarianism IF the latter is treated as a hypothesis: differences in group outcomes MAY be evidence of unfairness, exploitation, etc.
The question is what burden of proof should we put on any hypothesis.
HBD says “the burden of proof on discrimination is very high, since genes are a very likely explanation for a disparity or outcome”.
The non-hbd answer basically says the burden of proof is reversed. If there is inequality it’s evidence that Something* is wrong, even if we aren’t sure what.
Maybe . . . one other theme in play is the focus on materialism - only physical things exist.
Non measureable things - ideas, beliefs, insight, discernment, understanding- can’t be weighed, measured on a scale. Think B.F. Skinner.
The rejection of the significance of spiritual values - hope, faith, love, integrity, trust, etc., leaves no other explanation for human life, human outcomes than physical force.
The judeo - Christian tradition presents importance of human free-will . . .
“At that time they will keep calling me, but I will not answer;
They will eagerly look for me, but they will not find me,
Because they hated knowledge,
And they did not choose to fear Jehovah.
They refused my advice;
They disrespected all my reproof.
So they will bear the consequences of their way,
And they will be glutted with their own counsel.
For the waywardness of the inexperienced will kill them,
And the complacency of fools will destroy them.’’
- Solomon
“Therefore, pay attention to how you listen,
for whoever has will be given more,
but whoever does not have,
even what he imagines he has will be taken away from him.”
- Jesus
Free-will doesn’t mean humans are free from effects.
I think it is worth noting that while these three perspectives all include a bit of fact and emotion, they differ immensely in how much of each.
While I understand the argument for equalitarianism, my realism wants to dismiss it from this tripartite. At the same time I think looking closely at why there aren't equal outcomes by race is very important. We might all agree it is mostly reasons other than racism but hopefully we also recognize racism isn't irrelevant and if we better understand how to address what remains, that is good.
There is, of course, no reason only one of the three viewpoints must be chosen. Laws and societal norms could balance multiple points of view, and probably should.
I am partial to individualism, and think it should have the greatest weight, but I see some room for considering equality. I'm suspicious of the "realism" point of view, as I have only seen it used to support veiled racism.
With race there is also a problem that "race" is a fuzzy concept with no clear footing in science or genetics. Only the individualism point of view is unaffected by this fuzziness.
Rock is best. AK is right. Further: it's best - by far - that we should have a world where we don't feel the need to talk about this stuff so damn much. Where people in all their manifest differences have gotten along, this has been the polite norm. Unfortunately, that is not the world that is currently sought by those in positions of power.
"The more I read, the more I like my Rock, Paper, Scissors metaphor for describing the state of the argument."
Your Scissors category doesn't accurately describe the position. E.g., Steve Sailer (leading proponent of "race realism"): Treat Americans as individuals, but acknowledge that heredity & culture explain differences in average outcomes by race.
If you don't recognize the underlying causes, you will perpetually look to fix problems in unrealistic ways because most people, as you say, "intuitively find inequality offensive," and believe it requires a solution (and that it necessarily *has* a solution, which we just haven't discovered).
You should host a conversation with Sailer. It sticks out like a sore thumb that you never even mention, let alone engage with, him. (PS: He's a really nice guy, you might enjoy it.)
Steve says two things that individualists wouldn’t like:
1) HBD should play a strong role in immigration policy
2) HBD should play a strong role in foriegn policy
The bell curve made a similar statement about #1 and didn’t discuss #2 at all.
I feel like immigration is just going to be the big fault line here. This “treat people as individuals” thing seems fine enough when your high iq ethnic majority is secure, but it kind of seems insane when your importing a new majority of hostile low iq ethnics.
But as Bryan Caplan would say, those people are all individuals too and citizenship is just as arbitrary as race is it not.
If we assume legal immigration (ha ha but bear with me), Rocks could just give applicants IQ tests, say the ASVAB. That's treating people as individuals, from purely practical perspective it's trivial to do, there would be no need for any contentious lumping or splitting, and it would achieve most of what Steve wants from a HBD-aware immigration policy.
I posted a reply to this question below.
The first has nothing to do with social science, the second is dogma, and the third is thinly disguised racial essentialism. I reject all, in favor of the approach taken here:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-philosophy-and-policy/article/abs/why-should-we-care-about-group-inequality/81715DC592EA8ECD5315151E33C78BD9#
Paired with the axiom of anti-essentialism advanced here:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Anatomy_of_Racial_Inequality/R0R2AAAAMAAJ?hl=en
Implemented formally (for one example) here:
https://academic.oup.com/jeea/article/12/1/129/2317165
"the third is thinly disguised racial essentialism"
No. That's BS and you know it. Realism is not racism. Realism is not essentialism. Realism is merely saying "the statistical distributions of any feature between human population groups or the sexes will tend to overlap but the means and standard deviations of those distributions can differ and sometimes to a significant degree."
Your claim about disguised animus is exactly the kind of typical smear the left tries to deploy to avoid the mountain of evidence - to win the argument by dirty tricks instead of, you know, argument. As a common social judgment it makes it completely impossible for anyone to present a contrary case in a fair and rigorous manner without knee-jerk categorization of them of a bigot and the permanent ruination of their public reputation to great personal risk and expense. It is completely incompatible with a healthy intellectual culture of open, quality discourse.
Arnold is disappointingly not living up to his presumption against "asymmetric insight" in liking this comment, since this is a canonical example of ad hominem, not engaging on the merits, claiming that one's opponents have secret evil motives, and that their arguments and evidence don't have to be countered and can all be ignored because they are all just lies that thinly veil those motives.
I suggest you read some of the links posted, especially Loury's book. I don't think you understand what the axiom of anti-essentialism means.
Please explain the axiom.
Just read the preface and introduction to the book it won't take long
I asked nicely, and I'll ask nicely again. Please explain the axiom in your own words. And, if you are willing to put in some extra effort, to explain why one must follow such an axiom. Just yesterday in that discussion about philosophy, Arnold joked about ideas that couldn't be easily and accurately summarized. Is that what we're dealing with here?
"asked nicely"
After accusing me of knowingly spreading BS, engaging in smears and dirty tricks and ad hominem attacks about secret evil motives, etc. and accusing Arnold of endorsing this.
I did not respond in kind. This is not the kind of interaction that appeals to me.
I rejected all three perspectives, not just the one you are defending, and provided links to explain why. I have nothing more to add.
I'm sorry I really don't have time for this, if the references aren't helpful just ignore them. You may also want to look at the subtitle of Glenn's memoir, out in April, if you think his views are left wing. I have a blurb on the book in case that's of any interest.
I'm fairly certain that Handle is pretty familiar with Loury's work and that he's encountered the ideas before. If you want to have a dialogue it would be best to summarize the axiom here so there was something to discuss.
Right. I'm very familiar with all that - Loury's been trying to sell this nonsense for years - you may have noticed it hasn't gone anywhere, because it's not worthy of getting anywhere.
This is all pretty embarrassing on Rajiv's part in my opinion, and tellingly so. I wasn't asking him to do anything hard, just stop "arguing from famous name" and lay out the idea in plain language.
Here, let me do it for Rajiv. "When you see a racial disparity, in your effort to explain that disparity, only look for non-genetic explanations."
This is the intellectual equivalent of "the axiom of Calvinball" - "Oh, you say I'm losing because down on points? How about I change the normal rules and three-point shots count as zero? Now, I'm winning!"
If you don't believe me, here is Loury in his own words, "Anti-essentialism is a related notion, and I'm saying, "There's inequality between these racial groups." And one way to account for it would just be to say that they are different, that some people came from Africa, some people came from Northern Europe, some people came from Northeast Asia. These populations are essentially different, different in their genetic makeup in ways that bear on social outcomes. And while that could be true, it's a scientific claim, it's a scientific claim, for the sake of my argument, I was assuming that it was not true. And I'm getting criticized for making that assumption by some developmental and psychologists who study the heritability of human intelligence, because they want to question whether or not the claim is true. I'm not addressing the biology of race, I'm saying for the sake of my argument, I'm going to try to explain racial inequality without reference to essential disparity."
What he's saying is, I'm not making the kind of argument that qualifies as a reliable argument about empirical reality, cause it might go into inconvenient or uncomfortable truth territory. I'm just gonna avoid that whole badland minefield and restrict myself solely to the pleasant and popular meadows of pretty lies. He isn't fooling anybody who doesn't already really want to go along with this nonsense. For a so-called "intellectual", this kind of thing is frankly ridiculous.
Loury was getting criticized because he was taking a whole set of strongly-evidenced and compelling explanations completely off the table because ... uh ... reasons. Cause if you disagree with my special-case argument rules, you're a bad person. When people asked him in what other realm of empirical inquiry does anyone ever apply such special axioms or rules, he couldn't come up with anything, because, duh, that's not how things work.
I think Handle has assumed too much by Kling's "Like" but he is exactly right to complain about "thinly disguised racial essentialism." As I have no idea how to access Loury's intro and preface without getting the book, I had to use Google to get a better idea on essentialism. If it does indeed focus on the innate, that's not the same as a realism that includes culture. Note that a racial essentialist could be a realist but a realist does not have to be an essentialist.
It's possible I assumed too much, and if so I deserve Arnold's harsh correction and clarification should he wish to provide one (it's his place, he has every right to do whatever he wants.) I also admit that who 'likes' which comments is a petty thing to get worked up about. I found it surprisingly out of character; I would have expected a line like that to have spoiled the 'likability' of the comment.
I suspect there is a disconnect in meaning and intention here. On the one hand there is the perfectly reasonable position, "One should not *immediately jump* to genetic causes, *to the exclusion* of environmental causes, every time one is trying to explain some new observation of a major disparity between ethnic groups." That's fine, at least, so long as it is paired with "Likewise, one should not *immediately dismiss* genetic causes and dogmatically insist that all big, bad disparities are mostly environmental."
I think Loury and those like him are trying to smuggle in a *different* position, but under the guise of the reasonable one above. The position that one should *only* look for non-genetic explanations, and perhaps only propose or accept genetic explanations reluctantly and in desperation as a last resort when all other attempts have failed, is very distinct from the one above.
For one thing, as experience of decades and millions of examples have taught us, the non-genetic explanations quickly migrate to unfalsifiable territory where no one ever has to admit they fail. And if they haven't 'failed' anyone who proposes or accepts genetic explanations for anything is doing so not reluctantly, but, because 'prematurely', intentionally, i.e. they are a bad evil bigot moron hater, etc., etc. and you shouldn't listen to them, or even allow them to speak in a place where others could listen to them.
This is "Loury's axiom". It is of course no 'axiom' but just an arbitrary rule of ideological constraint on epistemic investigation which in practice operates as a thumb on the scale ensuring the the only possible conclusions one can draw are politically correct, but alas, not factually correct. Stripped of its purportedly nice intentions, it is just a new version of "'Shut Up!' he explained."
My guess is that someone who is in the favor of the former position is very tempted to support the second position, because, given how the second position is expressed in a confusing and misleading way, it's very easy to mistake it for the same thing. But it's not. The reason I ask people to express these ideas in their own, simple words is because, when you pull the sheepskin off, whoops, turns out it's a wolf.
Arnold, you have a number of people in your comments section who both subscribe to racial essentialism in their view of the world, and seem to object to being called racial essentialists, considering this to be an insult. They misunderstand and mischaracterize Glenn Loury's objection to this view of the world. I have no wish to engage with them any further, but would like to explain to you why I find this position objectionable on both scientific and moral grounds.
I'll do so with a simple example taken form a recent paper with Dan O'Flaherty, link below, extract follows:
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-981-33-4016-9_10-1
"The State of Mississippi adopted a new constitution in 1890 that identified the conditions under which a citizen would be permitted to vote:
\begin{quote}
Every male inhabitant of this State, except idiots, insane persons and Indians not taxed, who is a citizen of the United States, twenty-one years old and upwards, who has resided in this State two years... and who has never been convicted of bribery, burglary, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretenses, perjury, forgery, embezzlement or bigamy, and who has paid... all taxes which may have been legally required of him... is declared to be a qualified elector.
\end{quote}
The list of crimes here is striking for what it excludes. Murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, all violent felonies that today carry the harshest sentences, were not considered disqualifying. The reasons for this were subsequently explained by the Mississippi Supreme Court in the 1896 case Ratliff v. Beale as follows:
\begin{quote}
It is in the highest degree improbable that there was not a consistent, controlling directing purpose governing the convention by which these schemes were elaborated and fixed in the constitution. Within the field of permissible action under the limitations imposed by the federal constitution, the convention swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race. By reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependence, this race had acquired or accentuated certain peculiarities of habit, of temperament, and of character, which clearly distinguished it as a race from that of the whites,---a patient, docile people, but careless, landless, and migratory within narrow limits, without forethought, and its criminal members given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites. Restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone.
\end{quote}
That is, the rationale for stripping rights from those who had committed “furtive” crimes while declining to do so for those convicted of more serious and violent offenses was to selectively disenfranchise African American men, who had won the right to vote by 1869 under the 14th and 15th amendments to the United States constitution. Unable to exclude this group by name, the framers of the Mississippi constitution chose instead to rely on stereotypes that were prevalent at the time. By careful curation of exclusionary criteria, they “swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise.” And this was stated baldly and approvingly by the Mississippi Supreme Court itself."
The racial essentialists of the 19th century considered whites to be more inclined to commit "robust" crimes like robbery and murder, and less inclined to commit "furtive" crimes like fraud and embezzlement. The racial essentialists of today see things differently, they see whites as less inclined to commit the robust crimes. Both are reasoning from correlations, assuming causal linkages where none can be proved to exist. Loury's view, which I share, is that this is scientifically lazy and morally repugnant.
While certainly (inadvertently?) generous to the "racial essentialists of the 19th century" for their supposed belief that the more indefensible, lethal crimes were the sole province of whites, I am not sure how to square the assertion with Mississippi's withholding of gun rights from freedmen, in that same period.
Of course, once guns became widely available to all - after about 1910? 1915? - that quaint notion you describe (if true) was put to rest.
Is there any context in which you would actually debate someone on the subject of race realism? Genuinely curious.
Arnold wrote "The problem with realism (Scissors) is that it uncages the demon of racial stereotyping and prejudice." There is no good reason why that should be so. To anyone not stupid there is no connection between a group average and any particular individual. For example, there are roughly 40 million blacks in America. Even though they average a standard deviation, or 15 points below the norm, there are still a great many (around 6 million) who are smarter than the average white. I am fortunate to have been acquainted some extremely bright blacks. It's a matter of simple math that they represent a much lower percentage of their group than high IQ persons of groups with higher averages, but they do exist.
We shouldn't deny realism just because some might try to improperly seize on it to support their specious beliefs. The Left's devotion to identity politics blinds them to the fact that the group average says nothing about any individual. They are the ones committed to racial essentialism, not the realists or individualists.
Imagine the line, "The problem with realism is that it uncages the demon of people believing that the sexes are really different in lots of ways and then - get this - acting in accordance with those accurate beliefs."
The "every stance has a weakness" seems like sneaky language to me.
When someone says, "This argument has a weakness" they never mean, "This argument uses logic and evidence in a valid, rigorous way and comes to a conclusion which is accurate, however, lots of people really don't like that conclusion."
See the word game here? A "rational weakness" in an argument's validity or accuracy is a completely different matter than the "political weakness" of a truth's unpopularity.
Ugly truths are unpopular, duh! That's the Orwellian joke behind "Hate-facts". Now we can add "Weak-Truths". Good grief.
> Imagine the line
Unfortunately it is not at all difficult to imagine. In fact, I am positively certain that some such lines have been written in books on -isms by prestigious modern American intellectuals. Poe's Law strikes again! As for genetic/biological factors causing men to be more violent, they are passed over in silence as being both embarrassing to bring up in the light of other group differences (same happens with dog and cat breeds, by the way) and too obvious to mention. People a generation or two out may no longer "get the joke" and believe sincerely (to the extent that one can talk of "believing" - cf. doxastic voluntarism - and "sincerity" - see Randall Collins - in these matters) that it's all socioeconomic factors.
This hits the nail on the head. We already know there are genetic/biological factors that lead men to be more violent, and yet no one has a problem treating men as individuals.
We also don't have a problem with limited discrimination against men (women-only gyms).
And while more recently people have been questioning whether the legal system is unfair to men in some ways, no one is under the delusion that we need to pretend men aren't more violent in order to fix that unfairness.
I think you hit on the exact problem. "Race realism" isn't wrong inherently, but what people do with the information varies, and drifts into bad territory quickly. I have argued with self defined race realists claiming that since blacks are lower IQ on average they will never be as successful as whites and so will be a limitless sources of social conflict, and therefore must be expelled from the country, with the corollary that all nation-states must be mono-ethnic states. Even putting aside the... well everything there... it never seems to occur to them that the problem is that people find infinite ways of dividing themselves into groups, and so there will always be group differences, and the only practical way to deal with the situation is treating people as individuals. That's the point of doing that: it stops the infinite regress of ever smaller groups.
You act as if your treating others like individuals means they will return the favor, rather then pocket your concession and gang up on you as a group.
In other words your not being realistic.
You act as if there is a practical alternative to treating individuals as individuals, or that doing so is a "concession." One doesn't treat their wife based on her group membership after all. One might start from a broad group membership approach when they know very little about a person, but as they learn more they focus on the reality of the individual. To do otherwise is madness, and would result in e.g. treating your wife as though she were the average for her race and sex, and not a particular person. Or her refusing to share a room with you because she should treat you as she would the average man. Presuming she hasn't slept with the average man, that is.
Of course all of that is beside the point I was making in my post you responded to, but what can you do.
I think the issue is that people with strong aesthetic preferences for Rock would rather lose beautifully then win with the slightest stain of impurity.
The Bell Curve *could* be used in a manner to deny individualism, therefore it must be rejected.
In fact one could easily argue it should! The Bell Curve itself noted that the IQ of immigrants should be taken into account in immigration policy, and of course immigration policy being a national policy is going to have to engage in some "lumping". It's not possible to split public policy all the way down to the individual on every issue.
There is no doubt at least one innocent person in Bukele's jails, and yet everyone seems to think that treating people with tattoos as a hostile race that is guilty until proven innocent is mostly a good thing. He won ugly, some people would rather lose in buetifal purity.
If we assume legal immigration (ha ha but bear with me), Rocks could just give applicants IQ tests, say the ASVAB. From purely practical perspective it's trivial to do, and there would be no need for any contentious lumping or splitting.
Ultimately, any system of merit based immigration, besides needing to stop illegal immigration, is also going to run face to face with family re-unification.
Let's say you have a smart third world computer programer. He's got a wife and a cousin and a nephew. They are going to have cousins and nieces too, etc. He's going to have kids one day who revert to the mean, etc.
What we find in practice in the first world is that we get chain migration. It's just very hard not to unless you are going to have people live in dormitories are second class citizens on temp visas that get cycled back every five years, and most high IQ productive people aren't going to put up with that.
It could be done in theory, but in practice it's just very difficult to say "no". The sob stories write themselves and the immigrants, who are citizens with rights and votes now, have a strong incentive to push policy in that direction.
Perhaps LKY had that iron in him but western democracies do not.
Yes, that is a good point about family reunification. However, not that long ago immigration did not used to be run that way in western democracies, so the problem seems to be with the lack of counterweight to the sentimentalism which makes sob stories work politically rather than western culture or democracy as such. E.g. I gather (I have not studied this in detail so any of this may be wrong; please correct me if so) that there was no such thing as family reunification in the Ellis Island period: you could bring your wife and children over only if you could prove you could support them and even then they had to pass muster at the immigration counter. Men came alone, worked and saved for many years in order to be able to bring their immediate family over. They routinely spent a decade or so as non-voting aliens, assimilating to the American way of life, before they were allowed to naturalize, and for that they had to have behaved and acquitted themselves reasonably well. The strong pressure to assimilate, together with the earnest desire of most immigrants to become Americans, combined with American individualism to reduce the problem of voting for more relatives to be allowed to come over. Japan's skilled immigration policy is run on similar lines today. They do have the temp visas cycled every five years thing, too, but that is for menial labor and these are not allowed to bring even their immediate family.
The problem is there are no rocks on the left - the left has a clear aesthetic preference for "the lump" that is the criminal underclass. Rap music, most obviously. You mention tattoos. I think of this whenever I see a picture of some degenerate, as I did just the other day, when my husband who has a little bit of a hate-addiction to CNN, said, "Oh, they found that little girl" [her body] and I didn't know about any little girl and looked it up, and there is her murderer entirely covered in tattoos. Which is exactly the aesthetic the left celebrates; given a choice between two pictured dudes, tattoo-announcing lowlife or cleancut and employable, and they will choose the former every time.
No they won’t, only when they personally aren’t hurt, or lose money. This is exactly a luxury belief aesthetic. See who they choose as neighbors whenever the college educated Dems move, it’s always to the least tattooed neighborhood near their job that they can afford.
You’d have a long search, in many locales, to find an American woman not tattooed in the manner of - the kind of dude in prison for rape//murder of women. This is too commonplace to not include many fairly normal women, some of my friends even, back when my friends tended to be people I worked with. Not to mention virtually all Hollywood actresses, etc.
Sure, it’s still a class marker, to an extent - but it is the unmarked who are the irrelevant and vanishing class.
It does depend a bit on the place. Tattoos have become very common, but then in upper middle class areas they are still pretty rare (or easily covered up.) It is mostly the under 30 crowd that seems to have a lot that are foolishly visible, and the lower class.
I wonder if tattoo removal businesses are a good business investment going forward :D Even my young kids look at most young people with tattoos today and comment on how ugly they are.
Of course the least tattooed neighborhoods near their jobs also tend to be the cheapest, so they personally don't lose any money. /s
[up*. Oops, didn’t register the /s . Thought is was just a typo, and am busy with long reply to Arnold.]
I’m sure the least tattooed places are more expensive, more tattooed are cheapest.
I was being sarcastic (that's what /s means, in case you don't know). My point was that this particular belief is actually very costly for its holders and imposes real hardships such as ridiculous commutes in bad traffic, and can only be called a luxury belief in the sense that far from everybody can afford it. It is not in any way like a Gucci bag or a Lambo.
Your three categories mix two different things 1) What is the world like? 2) What is a good society?
It is perfectly possible to morally believe everyone should wind up in the same place even if they contribute way different amounts, even is some are stupid and lazy and some smart and hard working. But people generally aren't willing to bite that bullet. They kinda sorta believe all good things go together; everyone is actually essentially equal so in a good society everyone will wind up in similar places, at least there will be no racial/ethnic differences.
The solution is a synthesis of the three. They all have something to add, but any one taken in exclusion of the others becomes problematic. An analogy is the philosophical debate between universalism and nominalism. The modern West came to a place where each has its place and neither is taken to an extreme. Today the whole nominalism/universalism debate seems absurd to most of us, and that is where this race debate needs to end up as well.
What would policies based on a synthesis of the three look like? Would people be treated as individuals or as representatives of their respective groups? If some combination of the two, what would that look like?
Just common-sense stuff, removing the extremes of thought on all sides. There should not be any race-based legal codes. Real racial discrimination should be discouraged by law. Simple average outcome difference should not alone be considered evidence of discrimination. And overall race should have much less of a role in our conversations and debates than it currently does.
How does that differ from treating people like individuals?
There needs to be an acknowledgement that real group unfairness exists. Both in historical terms, leading to differing cultural patterns, as well as overt discrimination on the individual level (less common today than in the past, fortunately). Not all of the racial gaps are genetic. Pure individualism sounds like saying “let’s just move on,” which will not be psychologically sufficient to move us out of the current rut. And no, I don’t claim to have all the answers for how to make this synthesis happen.
"You are factually correct, but politically incorrect, so you lose," provides no possible basis for a synthesis. Acknowledgements of truths are good but only work if they are reciprocal and go both ways, but they don't.
I generally agree, but the term “group unfairness” bothers me if by it you mean unfairness by a group. Collectives are theoretical groupings by arbitrary characteristics. Theoretical groupings can’t act, only individuals can. When individuals are unfair, that should be reported, condemned, and, if illegal, prosecuted. But the sins of one person are not the sins of the groups to which he belongs.
There is nothing “arbitrary” about “black people” as a group. That’s a very obvious shelling point for coordinated political, social, and cultural action. They don’t all vote 90% democrat because all of thy ‘em decided as individuals that it was best for the country. They asked “what’s the best party for us blacks” and that was the answer most coordinated on.
You may wish that black and bridge player are both equally arbitrary groupings, but you know it’s not true.
This is an empirical question not a philosophical one.
It sort of circles back to the age old (and as I said earlier, mostly absurd) philosophical debate about universals. You have to be careful not to treat them too concretely, but you also can’t just reject them. As far as I can tell a purely rational treatment of the question always ends unsatisfactorily, but from a practical standpoint it works just fine.
Does Singapore treat people like individuals?
Kind of but kinda not.
LKY is the most explicit advocate of HBD in real world governance and you can go see what he said and what he did for examples.
A key piece of LKYs insight is that you need a dominant majority ethnic group with enough solidarity to keep political control. If you don’t have that society will inevitably descend into racial gangs preying on one another. This is why he crafted Singapores immigration policy to keep the Han a firm majority and worked to keep the Han based pap the dominant party.
Having established this han dominance LKY took actions to try and integrate the different groups together (in education, language, public service, housing , etc) while also offering each group its own private spaces if the my respected singapores laws and customs.
The bell curve and Steve sailer also offer suggestions.
This is a great insight, I'm impressed. I would like to elaborate with some of my own thoughts. I'm going to use Hughes, Kendi, and Cofnas as stand-ins for the three approaches.
1. Kendi "beats" Hughes in the sense that he makes claims about the world and Hughes has to respond by refuting them. This means Hughes is playing an ongoing game of whack-a-mole. Kendi can also claim to be pursuing a better world while Hughes seems to be supporting the status quo, and the former is more emotionally compelling.
2. Cofnas beating Kendi is similar in the sense that Cofnas is playing offense and Kendi is playing defense. Cofnas makes arguments for his position and it's difficult for Kendi to refute them. Kendi has to either engage in a debate he cannot win or refuse to debate. He can try to shut down Cofnas with stigma, but this isn't going to work on every "race realist" all the time - there will always be people making claims that are difficult for Kendi to respond to.
3. Hughes has a valuable weapon against Cofnas - pragmatism. Rather than addressing the arguments themselves, he can point out that Cofnas' ideas are impractical as a path forward for society overall and for the anti-woke movement.
I think individualism is the best approach, but if Kendism has enough power it's a tough opponent to deal with.
Brilliant metaphor
I think that is a good summary Arnold and I like your metaphor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0SoKWLkmLU
Lisa: Poor Predictable Bart. Always Takes Rock.
Bart: Good Old Rock, Nothing Beats That.
In the game of Rock Paper Scissors, the only way to assure losing is for your opponent to always know what your going to play, which if you only play the same thing all the time they will.
Steve Sailer had a line that once Scissor was banned from the Overton Window, it was inevitable that Rock would become the new Far Right.
Rock can't really survive the game unless Paper is afraid of Scissor.
If we were to get more nuanced, different situations call for different strategies. Treating people as individuals depends on the context and whether that is possible or desirable compared to the alternative. If I was forced to write an essay I would talk about Underwriting Costs and the practicality of Splitting versus Lumping.
Bukele doesn't treat people with gang tattoos as individuals, but as a kind of inherent criminal race guilty until proven innocent. And people love it.
Similarly, I would pose that on immigration in general Rock has just fumbled. Most situations where its pragmatic reality makes is difficult to treat people as individuals are very difficult for Rock to take the right actions.
If I were to give Paper its due, America probably could tolerate some level of make-work for blacks to keep the peace provided it didn't expand beyond them or turn into a permanent agitation state, but that's how it went down.
I think most Scissors people like Rock, they just see it getting taken to town by Paper too often.
The root of the problem is that it's very easy to persuade people who belong to readily identifiable groups which do not do well with Rock relative to others to take Paper. Envy and a sort of primitive sub-Dunbar sense of justice (these may actually be very closely related) are powerful feelings, whereas Mt 18:6 is not preached much lately. As a result, there is no shortage of (as Jerry Pournelle put it once) slick talkers willing to say it's all a plot. If one crop of them gets a vision and starts promoting Rock, social market forces will soon produce a new crop that will thrive on promoting Paper. Apparently it takes complicated social technology to suppress this phenomenon to harmless levels.
To add, such readily identifiable groups need not be long established or derive from previously well known categorizations of reality. It is enough that they be sufficiently obvious and readily identifiable to all concerned; the ensuing dynamic is the same. Here is a recent example. For 4 or 5 months the previous autumn and winter, we had massive load shedding for reasons not germane to this discussion. The utility company serving the city where I live split household electricity consumers into three groups, put up a rolling schedule, and at any given time one to two groups (depending on how severe extraneously imposed power constraints happened to be on a given day) were unpowered. Technically this meant switching off power delivery to last mile substations, each serving on the order of 10,000 households and regular consumer-oriented businesses such as grocery shops. Certain critical facilities such as hospitals, sewage pumping stations, communications hubs, the subway and so on were not unpowered, which was reasonable, easily understood by everyone and uncontroversial. Now the intention was to have the groups approximately equal in size, and from what I saw this was done as closely as reasonably possible without large changes in pre-existing wiring. However, Soviet and especially post-Soviet construction was a hap-hazard business in practice and builders sometimes connected new apartment blocks to whatever last-mile electrical distribution points happened to be most convenient, rather than what rules prescribed, and quite a number of apartment blocks ended up wired together with hospitals, phone exchanges and other such critical facilities. Nobody except electricians had any idea that this was the case, or would have cared a bent nickel about it, but once load shedding kicked in, it became glaringly obvious: every night these apartment blocks stood out shining in a lake of darkness and faint portable LED lights. This instantly created _readily identifiable groups_, and soon there was much bad blood about it, with people loudly demanding on social media that all such apartment blocks be somehow cut off and reconnected so that they'd sit in the dark like their neighbors. It was hardly reasonable to demand costly utility works for such a trivial reason and to castigate the inhabitants of those apartment blocks as if they were responsible for having ended up with their lights on, but there it was. It did not help that people had well founded suspicions that, at least initially, certain upscale neighborhoods were exempt for reasons unrelated to the realities of on-the-ground electrical infrastructure, and even when all such instances were discovered and eliminated, with at least a fraction of noisy people it proved impossible to persuade them that there was no behind-the-scenes play involved, that the reasons were really technical, and that the situation could not be corrected (if it could even be said to have been _wrong_ before) in a hurry just so that some people wouldn't have easy targets for envious vituperation. The majority of people accepted the situation as it was, whether from stoicism, fatalism, or perforce, but it did not improve anyone's digestion. I confess to having had to suppress stirrings of envy myself when I looked out of my dark windows. Fortunately, as long as relevant authorities can afford to ignore it, social media are the perfect relief valve for people most prone to such vituperation, and (despite hopes entertained in some quarters) nothing bad came of it except some ulcers, but one should remember that the cause was extremely trivial compared to ones being discussed in the OP post and comments.
Please, please, please do not use an acronym unless it is well-known to your audience. If you are commenting on a stock market blog, you can assume everyone there knows that SEC is the Security and Exchange Commission. Perhaps I am obtuse but I did not know what RIM means and after reading your comment still do not. Nothing at Acronym Finder seemed to fit.
> The root of the problem is that it's very easy to persuade people who belong to readily identifiable groups
> RIGs
I introduced it to avoid tedious repetition. Perhaps I am too used to technical writing where new notation is introduced whenever it seems to be called for. I will edit the comment to eliminate it.
Thanks.
Thank you Arnold. I shall add your rock/paper/siccors framework to my toolbox of ideas.
Great Rock, Paper, Scissors metaphor about the race debate.
We need changes so that every American who behaves well, even with low IQ, can achieve the American Dream: an education, a house, a family, a job that can support a family. Not committing crimes, not being hassled by police while enjoying legal life. This is likely the goal of those who are Rock individualists, and Scissors race realists, and possibly even close to the Paper equalitarians’ publicly stated goals.
“All men are created equal”. Yes, in the eyes of God, and all with human dignity and deserving of respect. Each individual is different – and different is never equal.
Thus, similar behavior in terms of effort will still result in different outcomes, based on different talent and environment, not merely on effort.
The success sequence works for low, medium & high IQ folk, based primarily on behavior, not IQ: graduate HS/ GED; no kids before marriage; get & keep a job; no criminal convictions.
Society does an inconsistent job at providing an education; we can force students to sit in chairs but we can’t make them learn. But the current “college only,” or mostly, as the goal of K-12, is failing many of the avg students not going to college, and is failing most of the low IQ students, those at 100 down to about the 70-75 IQ level, the “Intellectual Disability” level.
It’s excellent that Cofnas and other race realists are expanding the debate about race, and the false idea that races are equal in all important ways. We need more truth, and pushback against lies. Cofnas provides the strongest critique of the equalitarian foundation, “all are equal, therefore unequal outcomes are because of racism.” For getting the measured outcomes—degrees, marriages, wages, prison terms – the group aggregates are sums of the individuals, whose results depend on both behavior and genetic talents/ gifts/ privileges. In particular, marriages & prison terms depend far more on non-genetic behaviors, lousy Black culture. Degrees, and wages in a knowledge economy, have a bigger IQ/ genetic component.
The equalitarians falsely blame structural racism for results that are based on genes & parents, plus sub-optimal environment (SES), plus bad behavior – free will. The almost total failure of these equalitarians to judge individuals based on the behavior of those moral agents inevitably leads to worse behavior. Bad behavior, from oppressors or oppressed people, leads to bad results.
But race realism and anti-equalitarianism is somewhat missing a related, even more fundament unwanted truth: Life is not fair. People want life to be fair, “equal chances”, but high/low is not fair:
IQ, beauty, athletic talent; having 2 parents, being born in the USA – all of these huge advantages are undeserved luck. The existence of these unfair advantages is not an injustice. Unfair is not always unjust, and the desire for “cosmic justice” cannot be satisfied in reality. Real morality is based on activities chosen by the people who make the choice. There are no actions that equalize ugly and attractive people which are moral; no moral actions to equalize high & low IQ people.
Society needs an answer to Lenin’s always relevant question: “What is to be Done?” Falsely blaming systemic racism or whiteness doesn’t help more low IQ blacks achieve a middle class American Dream. Nor low IQ whites.
How do low IQ white men live and achieve a version of the American Dream? They get low status jobs, low but steady wages, less attractive women as wives. They might drink a bit much, play video too much, or take more drugs than is good – but get to work and pay their bills consistently. They’re buying a small house or condo in a cheap area, with a mediocre or below average school district school; or a trailer; or live in some rental place. This same behavior is available for black men, but far fewer choose these responsible behaviors. Lack of self-discipline in a person is an individual failure, not a social failure.
How much help should society be giving, not as a right, but as a civilization benefit, to the black folk in society, or low IQ folk? “Nothing” is far too little. So much AA that it destroys civilization is too much – tho it might be that the lying about “equality” is worse than the current anti-white racism.
The power of the equalitarians is that they’re proposing actions to solve the problem of racial group inequality, which seems more hopeful and virtuous than govt/ social neutrality, even if the hopes will always be dashed, in practice. Just like socialism. This is the Paper that wins the emotions over those hard hearted privileged Rock individualists.
In poor areas, black and white and Hispanic, there should be more govt rewards for finishing HS, for getting married before having a baby, for keeping a job for over a year, for not getting convicted of any crimes. There should be a govt based Job Guarantee. These are more carrots, rather than any negative incentive sticks.
The hard truth that equalitarianism is false, that humans can never create cosmic justice, needs to be joined with a generous program that helps incentivize better behavior among the poor so that any willing to behave well will have the expectation of achieving their American Dream, with greater measurable success than in the last few years.
"The problem with individualism (Rock) is that people intuitively find inequality offensive. If we treat people as individuals, and the resulting outcomes are unequal by race, this will not be acceptable. The unequal outcomes will be viewed as a sign that something is wrong with our society.”
I don’t think most people believe this. It’s certainly not intuitive. Only an “intellectual” or wannabe could believe this, probably rooted in envy. The notion that fairness must be judged by outcomes rather than individual rights is a recent development in academia which has spread only to its unthinking, status seeking acolytes. Most people want equal rights, not equal outcomes.
Ther is not conflict with individualism and Equalitarianism IF the latter is treated as a hypothesis: differences in group outcomes MAY be evidence of unfairness, exploitation, etc.
The question is what burden of proof should we put on any hypothesis.
HBD says “the burden of proof on discrimination is very high, since genes are a very likely explanation for a disparity or outcome”.
The non-hbd answer basically says the burden of proof is reversed. If there is inequality it’s evidence that Something* is wrong, even if we aren’t sure what.
Arnold
Interesting as always . . .
Maybe . . . one other theme in play is the focus on materialism - only physical things exist.
Non measureable things - ideas, beliefs, insight, discernment, understanding- can’t be weighed, measured on a scale. Think B.F. Skinner.
The rejection of the significance of spiritual values - hope, faith, love, integrity, trust, etc., leaves no other explanation for human life, human outcomes than physical force.
The judeo - Christian tradition presents importance of human free-will . . .
“At that time they will keep calling me, but I will not answer;
They will eagerly look for me, but they will not find me,
Because they hated knowledge,
And they did not choose to fear Jehovah.
They refused my advice;
They disrespected all my reproof.
So they will bear the consequences of their way,
And they will be glutted with their own counsel.
For the waywardness of the inexperienced will kill them,
And the complacency of fools will destroy them.’’
- Solomon
“Therefore, pay attention to how you listen,
for whoever has will be given more,
but whoever does not have,
even what he imagines he has will be taken away from him.”
- Jesus
Free-will doesn’t mean humans are free from effects.
Thanks
Clay
I think it is worth noting that while these three perspectives all include a bit of fact and emotion, they differ immensely in how much of each.
While I understand the argument for equalitarianism, my realism wants to dismiss it from this tripartite. At the same time I think looking closely at why there aren't equal outcomes by race is very important. We might all agree it is mostly reasons other than racism but hopefully we also recognize racism isn't irrelevant and if we better understand how to address what remains, that is good.
There is, of course, no reason only one of the three viewpoints must be chosen. Laws and societal norms could balance multiple points of view, and probably should.
I am partial to individualism, and think it should have the greatest weight, but I see some room for considering equality. I'm suspicious of the "realism" point of view, as I have only seen it used to support veiled racism.
With race there is also a problem that "race" is a fuzzy concept with no clear footing in science or genetics. Only the individualism point of view is unaffected by this fuzziness.
Rock is best. AK is right. Further: it's best - by far - that we should have a world where we don't feel the need to talk about this stuff so damn much. Where people in all their manifest differences have gotten along, this has been the polite norm. Unfortunately, that is not the world that is currently sought by those in positions of power.