I laughed out loud at this and from now on whenever anyone is straying into nonsense territory I will loudly and excitedly exclaim "A land value tax could've solved the resurrection of the Christ."
Although honestly the "immortality as an STD" is a close second.
> Although honestly the "immortality as an STD" is a close second.
It's a natural extension of the ideas I saw the other day, when someone on HN posted an article about death and immortality. The article, by IIRC some renowned scholar, talked a bit about biology, self-preservation and starvation responses, and then segued into germ line cells, proclaimed that those are effectively immortal if you look at them in a certain way - the same way as in "immortality as an STD" case here - and then the author concluded it's good enough as immortality for them, and they're happy with it.
> People talk about “fuck-you money”, the amount you’d have to make to never work again. You dream of fuck-you social success, where you find a partner and a few close friends, declare your interpersonal life solved, and never leave the house from then on. Still, in the real world you clock into your job … everyday
That line gave me a little moment of stomach-clenching horror: the loneliness... I think that would like be my personal hell. People really are different!
Really? I had legitimately no idea what he was talking about there. Other people really want to just stay home and do nothing? That’s a personal hell for me.
It is not about staying in the house. Some people (me included) do not want to keep "socializing" to continue forming connections and friendships. We would prefer if that phase would end sooner rather than later, and we can settle down with a partner and a stable group of friends (for life).
So you're "unfortunately" in the position where you can retire and still lead a rich life? Boo hoo Maybe you should retire and use that time to gain some perspective.
They aren't saying they unfortunately _have_ fuck-you money, they're saying they unfortunately relate to wanting to have a small social circle and not have to "deal with it" anymore
FWIW, I read it that way. It's not a sequence of "finish the game of social success" coming after "finishing the game of financial success", it's a complete replacement of which game the author/commenter wishes to finish.
The anti stock is actually a great idea, I am surprised Wall Street doesn’t do this already to create synthetic longs.
Unfortunately it would be hard to collateralize since there is technically no limit to the dividend, similar to a sold call, but just like a sold call you could collateralize with an equivalent sized long position. That could probably be useful for tax optimization (similar to how many of the crypto lending services require full or over collateralization of the underlying, with the market generally being people who want to spend appreciated crypto without realizing a gain). Congress would certainly eventually address this, but there would be a few glorious years of deferred capital gains.
It could also be extremely useful for market making - when you can’t get a share to sell to fill or collateralize an order, you generate a synthetic long and anti stock. But you’d probably have to get some system in place with clearing houses where you eventually replace the synthetic long with a real share. IIUC this is pretty close to how the system works already.
I want to go to this party, IME most Bay Area parties are just really awkward nerds trying to suss out who is making the most money
> The anti stock is actually a great idea, I am surprised Wall Street doesn’t do this already to create synthetic longs
Wall Street already does do this (and basically anything else you can think of that “Wall Street doesn’t do”). There are (at least) two forms. Firstly an Equity Swap[1] and secondly a Total Return Swap[2] (which is just Wall Street’s Swiss army knife tool for synthetically being long/short the return on some asset or basket).
If you just want to long/short the price return (and don’t include dividends which are mentioned in TFA) then there are also contracts for difference (CFDs) where the parties swap the price return on an equity. When I was in this business those were usually used because of tax differences between capital gains and other types of tax.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/equityswap.asp refers to it as having an index on one side and a rate on the other side, but there’s no reason not to have a single stock rather than an equity index and we used to do these 15 years ago when I worked in equities
Edit to add: There are also “dividend swaps” where the parties just swap the dividend return on the asset if you only care about that stream. This is sometimes helpful matching investors who have tax or other structural problems with receiving dividends with others who just want a dividend income stream without the asset price risk.
They do, as do TR swaps. They may not be advantageous for tax reasons.
For example, at one point, trading equities via swaps carrier a tax benefit to the end user, at no significant cost to the bank arranging this. Lots of institutions used that for trading. But later, the tax advantage was lost, while banks were forced to treat these swaps as a proper credit liability, thus depleting the pool of available capital. So people stopped doing this.
This is about 10 years outdated so I'm not sure what status quo is, but as a hack, this definitely exists in the US.
The Wikipedia description of a bucket shop says that it's gambling market on stock prices. The anti-stock idea in the article is a security where the holder is obligated to pay out the same dividends as the underlying stock. Not the same thing, AFAICT.
Probably because the counterparty is the dealer, so the dealer has to manipulate prices and terms in their favor to turn a profit. Also, since no actual stocks trade hands, there is no effect on stock price and no investment value.
Dividend derivatives have been a thing for quite a while. When Covid lockdowns started in 2020, EU mandated that EU banks are not allowed to pay dividends and Société Générale took quite a hit: "SocGen said it lost about 200 million euros on products related to the cancellation of dividend payments in the trading business." [1]
The actual big short (haven't seen the movie) was on a credit default swap index[1] (it was on one of the CMBX series which have commercial mbs as underlying[2]. There are also RMBX series for residential mortgages). CDSs are a swap (ie they are synthetic by definition) where one person is long the risk (short the protection) and one person is long the protection (and therefore short the risk). So the concept of who is long and short can be a little confusing.
[1]Source: worked at Goldman as a strat (quant developer) on the mortgages desk at the time. I knew and worked with pretty much all of the people involved although I was based in London. The actual person who came up with the research behind the short idea was a fellow strat and brilliant econometrician[3] and most of the trading guys fought him like hell over it only to later found hedge funds and pretend that it was their idea all along.
This is only a "Bay Area party" in an extremely small bubble of tech workers with insufferable personalities. It says more about the author than about the region.
The bay is a diverse place with all kinds of communities and parties.
Definitely no shortage of house music and ketamine for those that are interested. Or metal and biker bars if you prefer. Smoke a spliff outside the craft brewery, drink tall cans at the street fair, hang a piñata in the park for your kids, etc.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. This is a very specific, really small subgroup of people that Scott Alexander (blog author) hangs out with. This particular subgroup is hyper-centered around the Bay Area (Oakland/Berkeley, specifically), but the Bay Area is not centered around these people.
To each their own. I find typical parties with music and dancing and substance abuse boring (I'd take the ketamine, though, thanks). I would love to talk AI alignment on a party, particularly because people capable of holding a conversation on this topic can, in my experience, talk about many other things that don't boil down to sex, parties, $dayjob and regurgitating political memes from the news.
In my experience it's a lot less interesting than this. It's more like your typical party scene except everyone does drugs and is into polyamory or some non-traditional sexual practice.
I swear, literally every time I set foot in SF city limits someone offers me drugs... usually harder ones than I'd prefer. No, I don't want coke and some ADHD meds FFS. And no, we're not going to fuck. Married, thanks. I miss SF being about weed and psychedelics. God damn I can't wait to leave the Bay Area...
I must radiate "normie" energy because my experience is nothing like this. SF is just a nice city with good amenities, and where not knowing anything about the local sports team is completely normal.
Depends on who you know and where specifically you are. I have been to house parties in Mountain View that resonate with this. And loads of parties (mostly SF/Oakland) that had music and K. And the occasional crypto douche.
You’re in a weird tech bubble. Bay IME is very diverse but also very Scene-ey. Well worth it to break out and diversify. I wish I had when I was there, I ended up moving cross country and making more intentional decisions about my starting set of friends here.
> the fact is, we live in a world where a tiny number of people have an outsized amount of power. We - by which I mean the loose network of left-wing radicals - tried our best to solve it politically. But we couldn’t. So now we try a different tactic. Whenever a tech billionaire is at the top of his game - raking in billions of dollars, buying up newspapers, considering a run for Governor - we send him an invitation to the Innovation Forum. He’s honored! He always thought of himself as a practical man of business, not the sort of person who goes to Innovation Forums and pontificates to thought leaders about the future of mankind. But maybe it’s just that the world is finally recognizing his genius! So he clears his calendar for a few days, puts off inventing a new superlaser, and attends the Forum. And then a little later, he gets an invitation to the Tech Futures Colloquium, and he thinks - yes, I deserve to go to that one too. And so he clears his next week’s calendar . . .”
“And then you invite them to so many Colloquia that they don’t have time to accrue more money and power?”
“You’d be surprised how few it takes! At that level, you spend most of your time just keeping on top of what you’re already doing. A Forum or two a month is enough to bring most billionaires from actively expanding their influence to just treading water. Sometimes they even get addicted. Like Peter Thiel; I don’t think the poor dear has made a business decision in years.”
my god. Scott just made the case for Innovation Forums.
I didn't know anyone was using it as a descriptor like that, but in that context it seems to mean eating foods that have been around long enough to prove they have staying power and aren't harmful over any measurable time scale, or somesuch. Not sure I agree, but I sure understand the motive.
Yea, this was surprisingly thick and decadent sarcasm. I loved it! I read:
> “That’s so cheems mindset,” says the woman he’s talking to. Her nametag says ‘Astra’, although you don’t know if that’s her real name, her Internet handle, or her startup.
...and I knew I had to stop what I was doing and finish the read. The other two "house party" links [1] [2] were equally rich.
It would be cool if there was an app that created parties as engaging and diverse as these. In my experience people mostly know each other from work, and it’s not nearly as cross-functional.
> “This is an amazing party!” you shout. “How do you know all these people?”
“I don’t!” he shouts back. “I’m trying Partyr. It’s a new all-in-one party-throwing service. You give them an address, a time, and an ideal number of guests, pick from one of their preset themes, and they make everything happen.”
“Including the guests?”
“If needed! The idea is, you have some friends you want to impress by throwing a big party. But you don’t know how many of them will come. And you don’t want only two or three people to come, and then it’s really embarrassing. So you set an ideal number of people to come to the party. Then you see how many people RSVPed, and if it’s less than your ideal Partyr sends you enough guests to make up the difference.”
“Where do they get the people? Are they employees?”
“No, you sign up to be on standby for their service, and they send you a text if someone needs you.”
“How many of the people here tonight are paid Partyr guests?”
“About half, I think. I got most of the RSVPs I wanted, I just thought maybe with a few more people it could seem extra popular.”
“You definitely succeeded there!” You grab a guest on their way to the food table. “Hey, are you here with Partyr?”
“Yeah,” she says. She’s a tall woman in a fashionable dress. “This is my third time with the service. They always come through.”
“What’s it like?”
“It’s pretty great. You tell them what times and days of the week you’re available. Then if they have a need, they text you a day or two beforehand and tell you where to go. You get to eat other people’s free food, drink their free alcohol, and meet a lot of cool people. Sometimes you meet the same Partyr standby guests a few times in a row and make friends with them. Sometimes they even pay you a stipend. I got to say, it’s a pretty great deal.”
“Have you ever used them to throw a party yourself?”
“Oh no, there’s no alpha left in generic Partyr parties. I have my own methods.”
This. Or if not an app, then a way to reliably become participating in them as an adult.
I would've loved to be even a fly on the wall of TFA's party. To talk with people with insightful ideas, interesting side-projects, captivating stories, deep models of the world, or encyclopedic knowledge of some random topics. Geeks of all trades.
I've experienced something like this once, when couple things mixed up: I was finishing my degree, helped build and run a local Hackerspace, and with the Hackerspace crowd, we mixed up with the local maker and startup communities, both of which were also just forming. For a few years, we've had events and parties somewhat similar to TFA, with people from all kinds of fields, with all kinds of ideas and goals, mixed together, talked and chilled.
Ultimately, though, this amorphous maker/hacker/entrepreneur/scientist/artist community started to cool down and split back into multiple, more focused ones. Scientists got back to doing science^W^W chasing grants, makers and artists went to do whatever they do, startup people focused on $$$ and marketing, objective value be damned, and our hackerspace got back to tinkering with Arduinos and 3D printers and feeling smugly superior.
I do miss those times, miss those parties. Miss those people, who cared about something interesting, who wanted to do something good - and if not good, then at least fun in an intellectually stimulating way. In contrast, normal conversations with normal people are all just who likes what meal, what's on Netflix, who's dating/marrying/cheating on whom, who has children, who's throwing a wedding, where do we go for vacation, etc. In other words, it's a social equivalent of writing CRUD apps. Yes, it's probably important in many ways, but it is soooo mundane and boring as fuck.
I'm torn on this: When I originally moved to the Bay Area, it felt refreshing to finally be Among Nerds. My previous hometown had billboards on the highway that said things like "Don't Shake Your Baby" and "Are You Going To Hell?" whereas the 101 had billboards advertising iPhones and programming frameworks. I thought to myself, wow, culturally this is a big step up!
But then you go to a few of these "meetups" and you get steeped in the tech culture, and the banality of what everyone is doing here, and you find that people in these parties are just as self-centered, vacuous and insufferable as where you came from--except in addition to droning on about themselves, they throw in words like "blockchain" and "hustle", talk about their sour beer collection, how they might start taking ukulele lessons next month, and how their next startup is really going to crush it in the market this time. Not as stereotypically annoying as the people in this satire article, but very close intellectually to "who's throwing a wedding".
Similar experience for me, with the added note that nine times out of ten if you actually dig into what the Bay Area crowd is doing it’s some kind of get rich quick scheme wrapped in breathless self delusion about “changing the world”. Outside the Bay I find a lot more honesty and people just getting on with their lives.
Are there any meetups for HN people? I’m in the Bay Area myself and if people are half as interesting IRL as they are here it’s definitely worth the beer money.
I lived in the Bay Area after the first dotcom bust and before the second boom started. The parties were better then. Perhaps coincidentally, there were very few techies at them.
I love the comments here, especially the ones where people run with the obvious satire and try the idea on for size. The 'nerd-sniping' ratio for this article must be one of the highest I've seen on HN.
This is egregiously false. The author wrote a lengthy rebuttal of neoreaction[0]. The only sense in which he is sympathetic to Yarvin is that he reads his essays and argues against the ideas in them, as opposed to quoting the two worst sentences and calling him racist.
You probably shouldn't have said that. The case for his support for HBD-flavored racial supremacy is somewhat strong, and the case for his support for a new monarchy is not.
The case is not "strong" at all. He doesn't even state he supports HBD, only that he thinks some claims made by its proponents are likely enough to be correct or at least hard to prove not-correct. It's a rather uninteresting observation (everyone knows about some of these issues, they just disagree about the HBDers' causal analysis!) that only gets the attention it does because of how understandably contentious HBD is as a whole. The author does realize this of course, that's why he asks that the exchange not be publicized.
Just because the primary source is both readily available but presented as images on Twitter (apologies for the hosting domain, skip down to "Scott Siskind Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:12 PM"), the text:
The case for his support for HBD-flavored racial supremacy is somewhat strong
I don't think this is accurate at all. The case for his belief in HBD differences is strong. But I don't think you'll find evidence of him translating that to supremacy or any kind of racial ranking, especially across all dimensions. In fact, I think you'll find that he disavows any such conclusions.
He links approvingly to articles that appear to do exactly that, all the while saying that his public statements don't match his private feelings. Respectfully, I believe my own lying eyes.
> ... all the while saying that his public statements don't match his private feelings
Except that's not what he's doing, at all. There's no evidence that his links are intended to show approval either. A straightforward reading of what we've got is that he's probably been asked to discuss HBD in the previous (unseen by us) exchange and that's what he's doing, citing sources of HBDers' views.
That beggars belief. Not only does he cite them approvingly, but he takes the time to distinguish between which ones he finds particularly well-founded, and uses them as the summation for his first and primary argument, followed by "NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence".
Again: the mail is right there for everybody to read.
We don't need to guess what the author's thinking. we know what his first and primary argument is since he tells us directly: he thinks HBD is worth discussing because a few of its claims are either likely to be true or hard to prove as not-true. (And his cautious framing of even this limited issue is revealing enough. One idea he's very clearly not entertaining, not even in private is "HBDers are 100% right about everything!") I'm not sure what's your evidence for rephrasing "well-founded" as an expression of approval, given this previous context. The easiest way by far of reading that exchange is that the author is simply pointing to sources, not approving of them.
It's true, he doesn't think HBD-ers are 100% right about everything: Alexander is careful to point out that's he's not as sure about HBD's predictions vis a vis the four Albion's Seed English migrations to the US, in contrast to his other links, or the "absolute nuggets of gold" that include the HBD information he gleaned from neoreactionaries.
How much attention do you want to keep drawing to this email? I'm happy to keep talking about it, but then, you know what I believe about Alexander at this point, so you can see why.
This is where you might be missing some important context about Alexander's views. Namely, he's the guy who literally wrote a point-by-point refutation of neoreaction. And he clearly says in his email messages that he cares about debunking really bad neoreactionary ideas such as the ludicrous notion that we should all be collectively asking for a new king, like the frogs in Aesop's tale.
So why not just credit the simplest explanation, that he's disappointed at not being able to do the same with a non-trivial portion of HBD claims? Do we really need to believe that this guy is secretly a huge racist who believes in fixed hierarchies of moral worth among races, when literally everything he writes publicly takes the very opposite as its starting point?
Look, I know I sound glib here, and I'm trying not to be, I promise I am, but the funniest part about this is:
(1) I agree, Alexander isn't a supporter of neoreaction-ism, and
(2) One of the few valuable bits of information he claims to have gleaned from them is NRx-flavored HBD!
You get how that's essentially saying "well, I definitely don't think we should create a global monarchy, but those people do seem to have a point about the suitability of Africans for chattel slavery", right? That's what NRx-flavored HBD is. (I mean: it's really what all HBD is, but the NRx people are explicit about it.)
But don't just take my word for it. One of the two "more" well-supported links he cites is to Steve Sailer's blog!
I am not here to call you a racial supremacist for enjoying Alexander's writing, for whatever that's worth to you. I like a lot of Christopher Hitchens writing. That doesn't make me, personally, an alcoholic.
(I edited this a bunch, but tried not to change the meaning of anything I wrote previously. Sorry if that was annoying.)
Does it not concern you at all that you have, like, zero ability to assess the merit of HBD claims, and therefore are in no position to reason so glibly and confidently about Alexander's motives? If arguments for population differences are compelling, then all this schlock about suitability to chattel slavery and what have you becomes irrelevant. You imply that Alexander believes the former due to preferring the latter, but that's only a plausible accusation if the former is assumed a priori to be ridiculous.
(It isn't; on the contrary, there is no plausible scientific hypothesis that can attribute population differences solely to environmental causes. The entire blank slate case relies on sneering of the sort you do here).
I find it strange when competent people get so fixated on flaunting their ignorance.
I'm sorry again, but I just have trouble equating Scott's supposed agreement (by way of NRx) as to the nowadays-quite-fashionable claim that "American capitalism is uniquely founded on the oppression of enslaved Africans" with moral support for any claim of racial supremacy. A claim that slavery "worked" really well is tantamount to a claim that powerful, enduring systems of social organization could be built on the oppression of slavery as a foundation, and vice versa. These statements only differ by way of their connotation as to whether they assume slavery to be morally acceptable.
Nothing I am saying has anything at all to do with the 1619 Project (of which I am not especially a fan). When NRx people talk about chattel slavery, they're really talking about chattel slavery. Like, Calvin Candie style. And again: this is the part of NRx thought that Alexander found compelling. It's right there in the email! Which is about scientific racism, and Alexander's secret support for it ("NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS"). He called it "pure gold", like Kenny Bania on Seinfeld.
> When NRx people talk about chattel slavery, they're really talking about chattel slavery. Like, Calvin Candie style.
I suspect you're quite right as to where most real-world HBD-pushers are coming from. If this is your reason for your remark ITT that "HBD is generally problematic, and does tend to demand a response", I of course agree with that. I'll even sympathize with the intuition that engaging at all with such notions is by all indications a bad idea.
But when the guy who chooses to wrestle with some of these ideas is someone who has previously taken the time to logically and comprehensively debunk absolute monarchy, of all things, I think there just might be some room for extending the benefit of doubt.
We don't disagree about Alexander's support for NRx and never did. Follow this thread towards its root and you'll see me complaining that the person who brought this email up tried to claim Alexander as an NRx-supporter. That's a stupid hill to die on; Alexander is notorious for writing a ponderous rebuttal to NRx, and, more importantly, there's a much more attractive, easily climbed, and trivially defended hill right next door, as the email demonstrates.
I don't know if we agree or disagree about Alexander and racial supremacism. I think the email lays Alexander remarkably bare on that front, to a degree you don't often see even from people who publicly affiliate with white supremacy. It's a hell of a thing.
Finally: you're right: I'm not much interested in Alexander as a subject. I certainly wouldn't have brought his racial supremacist email into a random Alexander blog post! I think the comment that did was justifiably flagged. But once that happened, and HBD-curious comments started coming out of the woodwork... well, there's value in being clear about what was actually said, and in not pretending like it's defensible.
Yeah. It's a little disappointing. I've always found his posts around cryptography especially to be very interesting, and he clearly knows at least as much about it as anyone else. So finding that he can be so close-minded and judgmental in other areas makes me sad.
Maybe they have me confused with someone else, maybe they're referring to the person who brought Alexander's flirtations with racial supremacy up on the first place ('tweren't I), or maybe they've concluded that not looking warmly on Alexander's claims of being "doxxed" by the NYT equates to believing he's a white supremacist. But, as you can see: Alexander is not a topic I find myself talking about all that much about on HN.
Regardless: the mail is right there for all of us to read, and I reach the obvious conclusions having read it. I'm not as interested in Scott Alexander's moral failings as I am in other people's feeble defenses of HBD-ism; unlike Alexander, HBD is generally problematic, and does tend to demand a response.
Finally: if you go looking through the 'dang comment archives, you'll find that we're not supposed to be litigating our posting histories or trying to dig up dirt on thread participants at all. Instead of replying to that comment warmly, you might have instead considered flagging it. I have trouble with this rule too --- there's a person on HN who fervently believes authenticated encryption is a bad thing, and I have a hard time not bringing that up in every cryptography thread they're in --- so I'm certainly not high-horsing you about it. At any rate, though: I'm right about the authenticated encryption thing, and whoever that rando is upthread, they're not right about me.
I was referring to this[0]. I said you've felt that way for a long time, not that you post about it frequently. All I'm accusing you of is having held this position strongly and for a long time. If you say the people trying to convince you otherwise aren't wasting their time, fair enough, my mistake.
That link says the opposite of what you claimed. Of course, I don't agree with it anymore; I hadn't seen the email when I wrote it. You've refuted your own argument, but that's not interesting, since it was refuted one comment previously already. You've also misrepresented your argument (which was not "you held this position for a long time"), just like you did in the thread I linked to upthread; of course, like the Alexander email, your bogus argument is right there for everybody to read.
Fair enough about the not dredging up comments thing, I shouldn't have piped up, but you're taking this as waaay more of an attack than it was. The more nicely-phrased version might've been something like "If you're only casually acquainted with this debate, and are thinking of reeling off a low-effort paragraph or two of rebuttal, it's probably not going to go anywhere because his position on this famously contentious and vitriolic topic is well-studied." It wasn't phrased that nicely, because I like and respect Scott and find these threads a little triggering, but it was a mildly rude comment from the sidelines, not an accusation of devilry or a claim to be refuted. The "weird fixation" and "bogus argument" stuff is a little over the top.
It's not the rudeness so much as the dishonesty, as I explained. If you want to defend Alexander effectively, best not to create the perception that his supporters are amoral and untethered from reality.
... in fact, if you dip into the Alexander doxxing thread, you'll find the person you're replying to made the same false allegation last year, too. That's a weird fixation to have, but everyone's got their hobbies, I guess.
"Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it." - Moses Maimonides
Between populations there are bound to be differences, but there are a bunch of issues with trying to map that basic fact on to racial IQ rankings:
1) Race isn’t a well-defined variable. It’s socially-constructed. Example: Italian-Americans have not always been considered white. And many people are mixed race.
2) Intelligence isn’t a great metric either. I’m not even convinced it’s a single number. There are people who are great at maintaining dozens of relationships, and can remember things about each person. There are people who are killer at problem solving. And there are people who have uncanny kinesthetic coordination. Which one is more fundamental to human cognitive tasks?
3) Distributions. What do we care about within a population? Is it the mean? That tells us nothing about how skewed the population is. Is it the median? There are problems with that as well. The population could have a bimodal or multimodal distribution. Then what?
4) Confounding variables. You know what’s a lot easier to measure than IQ? Money. Unfortunately a person’s quality of education is highly correlated to the wealth of their parents. And so is stress, which knocks down IQ as well. And there are a ton of other confounding variables too that I don’t know about because I’m not a social scientist. If you do a straight-up tally of IQ you’re not necessarily even measuring anything cognitive at all.
There have been a few adoption based studies that work to correct for confounders. Nothing conclusive obviously, but it's not like no one has thought of that stuff.
Almost all the best runners in the world come from one Kenyan tribe. Meaning there are a LOT of Africans who are average or below average at running. Race is far far too broad to attribute to much of anything.
It's easy to find an African person more genetically similar to an Irish person than he is to another African person.
Source? The vast majority of people do not use that definition. Ask the average person for a list of races and they will easily answer with something like: African, Asian, European, etc.
And by your definition, many humans don't even have a race.
If you asked them to list races, they might give those out of some habit, though I doubt anybody seriously considers those to be races.
I mean, do people really think that the Han Chinese, the Persians, the Hindu Indians, etc., are all of the same race? No. People are aware there are various African, European, Asian, etc. races.
Why do you want a source? Just think about it. How could race be anything else?
Yes, many humans cannot be sorted into any one race. They have ancestors of various races.
Race not being well defined is part of why this discussion is fraught.
If you were to ask Winston Churchill about race he’d define it as something closer to what most people now would call nationality (e.g. he’d say that the Boers were a different race than the English even the ones who’d long lived in South Africa). An Idaho white nationalist on the other hand hyper focuses on skin color (with perhaps some religion thrown in if they are a traditionalist).
I acknowledge that the word 'race' is used in many ways. But in the context of HBD we can probably limit ourselves to those definitions rooted in biology.
I did not invent the definition I gave, though it is written by me. I suppose it is closely related to the standard definition of race in the sense we are discussing it.
Here's the first definition of the word "race" in the 1979 New Zealand English dictionary I have on my desk in front of me:
>a group of people having or supposed to have common ancestors and with similar physical characteristics
Which is close enough to my definition, albeit more general and less descriptive.
You may find that definitions similar to this are rarer these days. This is because there was a massive push in the late 20th century against race being a biological reality. A social understanding of race was promoted in its place. This push was based on such wild and undeniably false claims such as:
> data also show that any two individuals within a particular population are as different genetically as any two people selected from any two populations in the world
These claims have evolved since then, but as far as I can discern are roughly equally (though less obviously) false.
P.S. I'm not trying to retain your interest. If you don't find the subject matter of our conversation interesting enough of itself (as I do), then I don't want you to go out of your way to continue this conversation.
I think it would be kind of weird if we could correlate race with intelligence, if only because race doesn’t really exist biologically. Black people as a whole have more genetic diversity within themselves than every other race.
Black people are the "original" humans, all other races descend from much smaller groups of humans that moved out of Africa and colonized the rest of the globe (plus some admixture from extant Homo species).
So a bunch of alleles have never left Africa in sufficient quantities to persist in non-Black populations. And this probably applies to ADoS Blacks, too, since their Black ancestors were bought from the same entrepots in Western Africa.
I doubt that any serious racists consider that there is some single "black race".
Nonetheless, as far as I can tell, you're presenting the case that there are significant genetic differences between black races and other races, in which case: why can't some of those alleles code for intelligence, and why can't that result in a difference in average intelligence?
> I doubt that any serious racists consider that there is some single "black race".
Except that HBDers are doing exactly that. Last I checked, Igbo immigrants from Nigeria were doing very well in the British and European education systems. And there's other subcultures in Africa with a historical focus on education, like the Ashanti of Ghana, etc. It's not racial genetics; it's all about culture, norm-setting and equitable access to the education system.
Ghana is also one of the most stable and democratic African nations today, and the Ashanti Empire was renowned for its advanced political administration, so there's that.
There's no reason they can't. People that want to taboo HBD are afraid that the slope from "some difference in socioeconomic outcomes between races is inherent" to "all difference in socioeconomic outcomes between races is inherent" is too slippery, and the only safe way to ensure that the policy changes they want ever happen is to stabilize the consensus around "all difference in socioeconomic outcomes between races is due to systemic racism".
It's trivial to find an African person with more genetic similarity to an Irish person than he has in common with a different African person. Genetic diversity in Africa is massive. Think of the various Pygmy people as just one example.
This "Black people as a whole have more genetic diversity" is a technically correct but entirely irrelevant fact, a staple of popular disinformation on this topic. It is trotted out to lead laymen to a number of incorrect assumptions: a) that it's meaningless to speak of Africans (or specifically of members of the largest African populations) as belonging to a race; b) that raw Fst measures suggest some tribe X is "genetically more similar" to Europeans than it is to tribe Y and therefore is expected to be more phenotypically similar and c) that it's unproductive to discuss those Africans as having some specific average for some trait. It relies on equally irrelevant examples, like the difference in height between Pygmies and the Tutsi (although both sides of the debate are aware that Pygmies belong to a wholly separate "race"; the point of this maneuver is to make laymen assume that "racists" do not recognize this trite fact, and laugh at their lack of nuance).
Genetic diversity is not the measure of non-belonging to a race, nor some quotient by which variance of every phenotypic trait is multiplied or something, and in this context it refers to neutral genetic variation, which is higher in Sub-Saharan Africans (and very high in a tiny, unrepresentative subgroup – Khoisan, not Bantu) than in other continental groups, due to their ancestors not having gone through some ancient bottlenecks. Interesting for anthropology and history – tracing of migrations and such; not very interesting for purposes of differential psychology, "scientific racism", quantifying effects of nature and nurture, whatever you call it. A group can be very genetically diverse but near-identical in all traits, or arbitrarily diverse in phenotypes yet highly inbred; and Khoisan from different tribes will still cluster together despite having "more diversity". It's neither here nor there.
Most HBDers, including Scott, are not racists in the old-timey sense of normative preference for discrimination against some race or races. But sometimes, it's really hard to remain polite to people who know better yet knowingly spread disinformation to get laymen on their side. I fear that this rank dishonesty is enough to push some all the way over, beyond HBD and into the racist camp.
We don't know nuthin' about these topics any more, we know a great deal. And it's not a coincidence that the anti-hereditarian camp trades in vague generalities and factoids, and has to block access to databases. Decades of enthusiastic, well-incentivized search have not yielded any evidence in favor of the blank slate view, of the "it's all culture and schooling" view, the optimistic view.
> The whole argument is flawed. Overall genetic variation is mostly in neutral loci. By itself it tells you nothing about any particular trait. Europeans do have less overall genetic variation than sub-Saharan Africans (~20% less), but they show more variation in hair color and eye color than Africans.
> Essentially every domesticated species has less genetic variation than its wild progenitor. Dogs have less genetic variation than wolves. So, does this mean that the tallest wolf is taller than any dog? No – the tallest Great Danes are taller than any wolf. The heaviest mastiffs are heavier than any wolf. Chihuahua are the smallest. Greyhounds are faster than wolves (by a little).
So we should a priori expect uneducated subsistence farmers (or descendants of historically-recent enslavement, in the African diaspora) to score just as high on a conventional I.Q. test as, e.g. people from Britain, the Netherlands or southern India and China, whose cultural milieus have developed over many centuries in highly urbanized, complex societies? As well as expect them to have equal educational attainment, even at the highest levels (like working in high-tech STEM, or getting a Nobel Prize)? This just doesn't pass any reasonableness test. The Flynn effect on its own shows just how much I.Q. scores are affected by even comparatively minor developments in culture.
Are you referring to some specific study on uneducated subsistence farmers?
> or descendants of historically-recent enslavement, in the African diaspora
I posit that there is a perfect absence of evidence for "historically-recent enslavement" being a casual factor in present differences on tests, or in what they are meant to be predictive of. Controlling for income and parenting doesn't eliminate the gap. Explanations based on lead poisoning in minority environments used to be popular until lead exposure converged – then they got ditched. So it goes. In fact, no proposed mechanism withstands the slightest scrutiny, it's ignorance and/or special pleading all the way down.
> southern India and China, whose cultural milieus have developed for many centuries in highly urbanized, complex societies
How is does this nebulous "cultural mileu" higher classes were exposed to affect the IQ or SAT score of a descendant of an average uneducated malnourished peasant from southern China (and of Great Leap Forward/Cultural Revolution survivors)? Do you have any concrete mechanism in mind that is as robust to controls as the genetic hypothesis? For example, adoptees of Korean descent in Sweden have significantly higher IQs than non-Korean adoptees and even non-adopted children [1] – how is that explained, social expectations from Asian-looking people? This is just one fact among thousands, and together they require implausible power of racist attitudes to be explained – greater, and bizarrely far more precise, than for any social intervention known. And unchanging in magnitude despite increases in legal and social equality. Cultural milieus, redlining, Pygmalion effect, epigenetic trauma etc. must all act in concert to perfectly imitate the appearance of between-group heritability just working the same way as within-group heritability.
And when another one of those factors fails to replicate, others must pick up the slack.
Crucially, were the Chinese immigrants low-performing, would it confuse you – or would you have been able to spin a just-so story about recent environmental deprivation that's no less convincing than in the case of Africans? Certainly works with Indians, who, as a whole, do not score highly on tests – cultural milieu or not.
...I'd rather we skip this song and dance – no amount of links and arguments is likely to convince you, since you can just suspect the ideology of their authors that much stronger. I am pretty sure that you are not willing to entertain the thought that this complex topic has been studied by smart and unbiased people, with conclusions favoring the genetic determinist side, e.g. [2], and that your ad hoc "reasonableness test" is insufficient to make a call.
What I am more interested in is a sociological question: why do you think it is adequate? Obviously you are aware that you have not inspected the topic in depth.
> For example, adoptees of Korean descent in Sweden have significantly higher IQs than non-Korean adoptees and even non-adopted children
It's one thing to find measurable differentials somewhere, another to pretend that such differences are enough to explain even a worthwhile fraction of the achievement gap. The average kid of Korean descent would have significantly higher achievement in Sweden or South Korea than North Korea, and that for entirely non-racial reasons. And most lowest-developed countries are, sadly, more similar to North Korea than Sweden.
This is a matter of one's priors. One could just as easily say that it's one thing to find a clearly environmentally mediated difference in some extreme situation (i.e. between North and South Koreans), another to pretend that such differences are enough to explain even a worthwhile fraction of the achievement gap – especially between different ancestries within the same polity, in the absence of any overt discrimination or substantial evidence for covert one.
It'd be a better argument, even. Despite severe global sanctions and a ridiculous political and economic system, there isn't that much of a difference between North and South Koreans. Denizens of DPRK still maintain an orderly society with universal literacy and advanced domestic technology, and overall demonstrate cognitive performance on at least European level – with like 5% of GPP per capita that South Koreans have, on par with poor African states. Which are, indeed, among the lowest-developed, and frequently fail to maintain basic infrastructure – despite external support.
I do note that you have ignored my meta-level question, though, and that says enough.
Who is this blogger you’re linking me to and why does your second link try to claim “economists know a lot about human biology and evolution”, with no evidence to prove this beyond I’m pretty sure is just author intuiting it wholesale? Are economists leading genetic sequencing studies?
That would be true if HBD people came to random, or even just varied, conclusions about gene/intelligence determinism, but of course, they come to a consistent and specific conclusion about it: a hierarchy of race-determined intelligence that goes Asians, Europeans, Everything Else, and then people of African ancestry.
No, it doesn't, but it doesn't follow straightforwardly from the rationale the previous commenter gave, and that's telling. It's not complicated; it's a pretty simple motte-and-bailey.
Notice how neither you nor my previous interlocutor skipped a beat about the racial hierarchy I laid out, despite that not being in either of the previous two definitions of HBD on this thread. That's because the bailey is so well-understood it usually doesn't even need to be said.
The reason akomtu and I adressed the "mott" is that it was the claim ascribed to HBD:
> HBD (or "human biodiversity") is a euphemism for the view that there are genetic racial differences in intelligence.
and the "bailey" can be split into two parts: one follows from the mott, that races could be ranking according to intelligence. There's obviously no MaB fallacy here. The second part is the specific racial ranking you provided. But no one had mentioned that until you got here, so it's clear that there's no intentional MaB fallacy going on.
No one was trying to affirm any specific ranking of races by intelligence. That's a closely related, but very different kind of question (a very empirical type question).
I don't think this is worth debating. I stand by what I said about this thread, but the question of what Scott Alexander meant is not in doubt; it's clarified in the email.
It seems to me that you just have a more specific issue with HBD than
jasonhansel has.
jasonhansel takes issue with the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence
You take issue with another, related, one of HBD's ideas: a specific ranking of races by intelligence that it advances.
I was only supposing that the first claim seems likely to be true, so I'm not sure that there has been any substantive disagreement between us on those two matters.
This is a thread about an email chain from the author of this article, in which the context of "HBD" is made quite clear. There's no useful parsing to do here. If the term has other, more benign uses, I'm not aware of them, and am not super interested in discussing them; here, to be clear, we're most definitely talking about a malignant meaning.
I'm not suggesting that the term "HBD" has other more benign uses. I'm suggesting that it refers to a body of thought in which various claims are made, and that you are focused on one of those claims, whereas our ancestor comment was focused on another.
I'm sorry, but I've lost track of what you're trying to argue about with me. I think it's fine to just disengage! We're not going to persuade each other.
Race is a social construct in the context of American racial history and politics, where categories were invented long before the concept of genomic ancestry and "Hispanic" counts as a race. In the rest of the world and within the context of this discussion and other discussions of this sort "race" is a noisy proxy for continental-level ancestry, and it so happens that even American "races" correspond decently well to proportions of ancestry traceable to continental-level populations, with their distinct histories and adaptations. Separating unlabeled genomes into N clusters, we predictably arrive at close matches to traditional racial classifications.
The fact that some small (half a million, a few tens of thousands...) populations constitute distinct clusters that pop out at small Ns is a nice gotcha, but entirely beside the point – which is the a priori plausibility of noteworthy and systemic heritable differences between people of major races, irrespective of their belonging to any social constructs.
Race at a continental level is almost useless for biological purposes. Almost all the best runners in the world come from one Kenyan tribe. And those Kenayans have more in common genetically with an Irish person than they do with a Pygmy from their same continent.
If you want to look at very small populations then you can find useful biological similarities. And small populations are nothing like what anyone calls race.
Race is real. It's just socially constructed instead of being based in biology.
I agree that a more fine-grained classification is more useful. However, the fact that all the greatest long-distance endurance runners are of Kalenjin descent (Nilotic race) tells us next to nothing about any other trait. All the best sprinters are also Africans – but predominantly of Bantu ancestry, pretty diverse in this case. As are most NBA stars, and the great proportion of other athletes defined by a rather obvious subset of physical excellences linked to fast-twitch muscle fibers. At the same time, somehow no Bantu group excels in swimming.
So using this method of yours, we derive that a great deal of a people belonging to a major race can have a similar ability profile in sports. Not too good for your argument.
If you have to refer to non-central examples, this only shows that your actual case is weak.
It's not that more fine-grained classification is useful, it's that race is not a useful biological classification. To build upon your own example, neither skin color nor running ability nor what continent you came from can be used to tell us about other traits.
But I'll let Princeton sociologist Dalton Conely explain to you what you're getting wrong about the science.
The author of the linked article is a heretic from left-wing ideological orthodoxy, and therefore you should disregard anything he has to say on any topic whatsoever, no matter how well or poorly argued. After all, you don't want to associate with heretics, right?
While not endorsing the sentiment that we should disregard literally everything this author ever says, there are a variety of ways to be a "heretic from left-wing ideological orthodoxy", and "racial supremacist" is a particularly bad one. The objection isn't simply that the author doesn't believer workers should own the means of production.
I don't see Scott arguing for "racial supremacy" in any of the quoted emails though? He said he thinks genetic differences in intelligence are likely real, which is fundamentally different from "race x is superior to race y."
You didn't type the links he approvingly cited in by hand, and pull them up in archive.org, to see what they said, did you? That makes sense --- it's a pain --- but why would you hang your argument on the premise that nobody else took the time to do it? The links lay it pretty bare.
Somebody should take the time to further archive them, since this author keeps popping up, and, inconvenient though this truth is, it remains the apparent truth that he sent emails saying he believed this stuff.
Although honestly the "immortality as an STD" is a close second.