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From CNN:
MRIs show racism and poverty may alter brain development of Black children, study says
By Justin Gamble, CNN
Published 9:40 AM EST, Sat February 4, 2023Black children living in poverty face increased instances of stress and trauma that can alter their brain development, a new study found.
The study was published this week by the American Journal of Psychiatry. Researchers at Harvard University examined MRI scans of 7,350 White and 1,786 Black children ages 9 and 10. The data in the study was collected by the National Institutes of Health in 2019.
This is data from the lavish Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study of 10,000 or so kids age 9 to 10 that I wrote about in connection with Fuerst and O’Connor’s important study of the correlation between racial admixture and IQ.
Researchers found that increased stressors like economic hardship and systemic racism play a significant role for Black children and can lead to the development of mental health issues as they age, the study said.
The stressors contribute to Black children having less gray matter in their brains, a byproduct of absorbing “toxic stress.” The study defines the stressors as “prolonged exposure to adverse experiences” that lead to excessive stress hormones and “disrupt the immune and metabolic regulatory systems.”
I don’t find it at all implausible that, say, hearing gunfire in your neighborhood not infrequently as a child could be bad for your growing brain. But from scanning the article, I don’t see much reason to to think it’s more plausible than that families with less functional brain structures tend to wind up in shootier neighborhoods. Or, quite likely, both could be true to some extent.
What you’d need to do is study children’s brains over a number of years and correlate changes to the stress they endured in the interim.
In the study, researchers found that Black children often developed behavioral problems later in life such as PTSD, anxiety and depression. These children also were susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse and suicide attempts and were likely to commit violence, the study said.
Nathaniel Harnett, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who led the study, told CNN their analysis sought to examine how early the effects of structural inequities and racism would appear in brain development. Harnett said his team began exploring a cognitive development study to dispel “this kind of folk belief that Black and White people have categorically different brains.” …
But they wound up finding from the ABCD that brains did differ on race, so then they announced that it was due to racism.
Harnett said his team’s analysis underscores the need for “large-scale structural and systemic change,” especially in policy.
If black children’s cognitive development is suffering from too much violence in their neighborhoods, then clearly what we need to do is depolice them so that black homicides go up dramatically after George Floyd. Because reasons.
Harnett said the data researchers examined suggested “that what’s really driving any differences are the sort of disproportionate burden of life experiences that people have.”
This is the 150 year old question of nature vs. nurture, first outlined by Francis Galton. It’s a really tough problem, and you can’t just sort of Assume We Have a Can Opener your way to the right answer. For instance, the full study contains no text strings of “genes” or “genetic”.
Researchers said Black children are much more likely to be exposed to violence, live in disadvantaged neighborhoods, and combat systemic racism daily than White children.
Nor can you do good science by just assuming that all the problems of black people, especially ones born in this century, are the results of “systemic racism.”
… “The adversity that these kids are exposed to, it impacts everyone, but it disproportionately burdens Black children in this case,” he said.
If I recall correctly, ABCD will do brain scans of the participants every two years for a decade. (They also have gene scans for all the kids.) However, this study appears to be only using the first planned MRI, not the subsequent ones. You can see the usual problem with using just one scan to try to disentangle the effects of nature and nurture, genes and environment. They can use the future brain scans to compare against subsequent nurture, but those haven’t happened yet.
The authors seem to deal with these obvious, classic problems by simply ignoring their existence.
From the study:
An independent-samples t test demonstrated that racial groups differed in intracranial volume (t=19.44, df=8235, p<0.001).
In other words, whites average larger brains than blacks. But the researchers did not consider that as a possible reason for lower black educational achievement. It’s unthinkable.
Thus, the gray matter volume of our a priori regions of interest (PFC, hippocampus, amygdala, and insula) was normalized as a proportion of estimated intracranial volume ([region volume/intracranial volume]×100) and averaged across left and right hemispheres.
So they did analyses of the proportional differences in brain regions, but not of overall brain size: Occam’s Butterknife.
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White children living in poverty, however, experience every imaginable privilege, for which they need to be punished for the rest of their lives. Got it.
Now that means something, but what???
Because it's an uninteresting and irrelevant quesiton.Fair enough. But, aside from the defensiveness of the response, what's it have to do with one's ability to answer the question? And the question still stands. What is the primary attribute of the human brain? And what does that have to do with anything? Obviously, it's the human brain. So it has everything to do with everything! Especially since the question can be answered. In fact, especially since the question has already been answered. So maybe we should apply that answer to our knowledge of the relationship between genes-culture, nature-nurture.
That is pretty much the summation of HBD.Replies: @Rich, @Intelligent Dasein
O’Connor wrote an interesting follow-up to the Fuerst and O’Connor paper that Sailer mentioned: https://psyarxiv.com/863cv
Presumably they couldn’t find any Asian or Hispanic children.
Nor did they find any blacks who live in affluent majority white suburbs.
Nope, nothin' doin'! As always, these "studies" focus only on two of the races existing in the U.S.
Fancy that!
Maybe test kids in the less colonized areas of Africa?
Oh wait, they weren’t colonized because the natives so violently resisted colonization attempts.
==
The disease environment made the African interior lethal until the late 19th century (bar the southernmost latitudes). Even after that, public heath and climate inhibited colonization. You had white soldiers, officials, missionaries, and mining engineers. You did not have many white settlers except in the temperate and subtropical zones and in the highlands.
I’m guessing the Mean White Ladies who populate education and media don’t want to bring up the issue of brain difference at all.
Did they control for socioeconomic status?
Now do comparative scans of male and female brains to discover differences due to sexism…
….Oh my!, dangerous ground , must tread veeeery carefully , advanced degree ,credentials and all ,wouldn’t want to end your days working in a Quicky mart . Just think of ” economic hardship and systemic racism” as sand bags around an army out post ,there to catch incoming rounds , just hope there’s no big stuff .
Whoa! Look at the timestamps so far: 22, 33, 44, 55.
Now that means something, but what???
I’m confused.
How do black children and white children still have identical IQ scores with these kinds of differences?
CNN:
Mandatory repatriation to Africa of all DOAS and similar-looking people: it would be an altruistic win-win. Do it for the children.
https://www.mcleanhospital.org/sites/default/files/styles/headshot/public/2022-01/HarnettHeadshot198Oct272021.jpg?itok=a9epB6lLReplies: @Element59, @kaganovitch
Oh no, now MRIs are revealed as racist too, coz there is no such thing as race, let alone differences of any kind among races. Curse those privileged white supremacists!
Sorry but I refuse to accept these researchers stats as they are the product of colonized maths.
In the ranking of world universities, Harvard is frequently ranked number one. This academic paper published in a prestigious journal will surely add to its prestige. May be not.
https://twitter.com/WorryQueso/status/1620808506847920134?s=20&t=tDGtNuI1rZ41i5dUF5068w
There are obvious controls that need to be done:
Look at Blacks of different SES: middle-class vs. ghetto blacks.
Look at Blacks whose genetic parents were ghetto Blacks but who were themselves adopted by middle-class families (Black or White).
There is this thing called the scientific method.
I suggest these researchers look at black children adopted by white families in infancy and then write about how the effects of racism are so pervasive that they impact black babies neonatally. At least we’d have the data then. Evidently you can do this kind of research, you just have to look like you sincerely believe the problem is systemic racism.
The average American black is 15-20% Northern European genetically. It is interesting though how mullato blacks have worse mental health than pure(er) blacks, and thus they may be smarter but not overall better off.
Then there's the factor that per Ed Dutton, people who elope outside their race are more narcissistic and psychopathic as it indicates extreme lack of in group loyalty, particularly if it's with blacks (as opposed to East Asians or the more whiteish of Hispanics). We also know that white women who elope with blacks tend to self-report a lot of disagreeable traits.Replies: @Mike Tre, @Charlesz Martel, @Truth, @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco
Before George Floyd.
His analysis underscores... I.e. his assertions underscores the need for the his policy preferences.
They definitely definitely did not find any Asian or Hispanic children who live in an urban area that has a good number of poor blacks.
Nor did they find any blacks who live in affluent majority white suburbs.
Look at Blacks of different SES: middle-class vs. ghetto blacks.
Look at Blacks whose genetic parents were ghetto Blacks but who were themselves adopted by middle-class families (Black or White).
There is this thing called the scientific method.Replies: @Spangel226, @AndrewR, @Feryl, @New Dealer, @Wizard of Oz, @AnotherDad, @Hypnotoad666
But all of this will get cancelled if they made an honest effort to diagnose the cause.
I suggest these researchers look at black children adopted by white families in infancy and then write about how the effects of racism are so pervasive that they impact black babies neonatally. At least we’d have the data then. Evidently you can do this kind of research, you just have to look like you sincerely believe the problem is systemic racism.
So presumably you would expect to see a very steep decline in gray matter and IQ in people who lived through years of stress of having their cities bombed and lives severely impacted in Europe in the 1940’s or Korea in the 1950’s or Vietnam in the 1960’s? My gut tells me that’s not the case.
What is the primary attribute of the human brain?
That’s the question I would put to Steve and anyone else interested in understanding the relationship between nature-nurture, genes-culture, sameness and difference, etc, but especially to the people who conduct studies like the one in this article.
Interestingly, if you do an online search you won’t get an answer. Either they don’t know, or they don’t want us to know. The answer, of course, is very simple and obvious (then again, it’s always the obvious that eludes us). But implications, and consequences, are immense. So why no discussion, or even any interest?
Of course, one obvious answer could be,
Because it’s an uninteresting and irrelevant quesiton.
Fair enough. But, aside from the defensiveness of the response, what’s it have to do with one’s ability to answer the question? And the question still stands. What is the primary attribute of the human brain? And what does that have to do with anything? Obviously, it’s the human brain. So it has everything to do with everything! Especially since the question can be answered. In fact, especially since the question has already been answered. So maybe we should apply that answer to our knowledge of the relationship between genes-culture, nature-nurture.
As a control, they could do brain scans of White children who experience constant systemic racism — like, say, from attending schools with large black populations — and who experience extreme levels of race-related violence and stress, like say, being a nine-year-old White girl being savagely beaten by feral mini-simians.
But instead we will simply rely on studies from the Bix Nood Institute.
White brains and black brains are different? This is proof even God is racist.
Weren’t the twin studies a can opener? You separate twins at birth, and over time, a twin is going to mainly resemble his biological parents, rather than adoptive parents. Sounds like a can opener.
Dis here racism be like climate change. It done explain everything.
In ma case, brain function be different from da cracka heads cuz ma mama done slap me upside da head every time I done gib her lip.
'Racism' is to Generation Woke what 'self-abuse' was to the Victorians.
Tangentially...
A recent article from same publication (NZ Herald) the archived piece linked above is from:
Truth behind concerning new sex trend that can cause serious harmEven within the realm of the sexual, every age has its quirks, excesses and indignities. Who is to say that --on balance[cbc.ca][1]-- the Victorians' were any worse than ours?
[1] Don't be put-off by the click-baity title, gratuitous photo, and cram of punny double-entendres that characterize the style of the article. They are unfortunate but the article's substance, largely serious and sensible, is better summed-up in its subtitle:
"There is no one true science of the female orgasm"
Many would no doubt hasten to add, And it is at least as much of an art as a science. (As if even the latter is settled...)
I sense an impending change in the Party Line.
The will never state it this baldly, but in essence:
Blacks really are stupid after all, but it’s the White Man’s fault.
Being inside an MRI machine is pretty stressful to begin with. Rap music is much worse though. That’s probably what it is … yeah, surely …
"Rap music is much worse though."
Black mothers are the primary cause of small-brained black man dysfunction.
“These children also were susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse and suicide attempts . . .”
Well that’s puzzling to me, because I thought it was common knowledge that Blacks are the race that is least likely to commit suicide. The highest suicide rates are to be found in Scandinavia, the Baltics, and Northeast Asia.
Whites also have much higher rates of alcohol consumption and alcohol use disorder. 76% of white males regularly consume alcohol while only only 62% of Black males consume alcohol. Among American adults, 6.5% of Whites engage in heavy drinking verse just 2.9% of Blacks.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db374.htm
Would be interesting to study why Whites have twice the rate of heavy drinking compared to Blacks. Is it due to our higher levels of grey matter or due to our larger brains? Does our excess gray matter result in higher rates of anxiety and depression? Does the lower grey matter of Blacks help increase their happiness levels and lower their rates of depression and anxiety? Is this the root cause of the increased self-esteem of Blacks? Does too much grey matter lower happiness and increase anxiety?
despite the higher poverty levels of Blacks they continue to report higher levels of happiness, higher self-esteem while having less anxiety and depression compared to Whites. Why would Blacks want more gray matter if the result is less happiness, increased anxiety and higher rates of suicide and depression? Maybe the lower grey matter is an evolutionary benefit which reduces depression and anxiety, resulting in higher fertility rates . Whites, with their larger brains and excess gray matter are facing extinction while Blacks are growing their population and thriving in the 21st century. Our excess gray matter may be the root cause of the collapse of the white population.Replies: @Hapalong Cassidy
The elite class only exists to rape, enslave and kill us. That is their sole reason for living.
Look at Blacks of different SES: middle-class vs. ghetto blacks.
Look at Blacks whose genetic parents were ghetto Blacks but who were themselves adopted by middle-class families (Black or White).
There is this thing called the scientific method.Replies: @Spangel226, @AndrewR, @Feryl, @New Dealer, @Wizard of Oz, @AnotherDad, @Hypnotoad666
“The scientific method is a tool of white supremacy ”
Read ’em and weep, Deplorables: Harvard study shows God is a racist.
“We need you to come downtown and answer a few questions about that church you’re attending, Mr. Doe.”
these guys are gonna end up getting so fired. Jason Rich wine, except they won’t see it coming
Bryan Pesta was fired for studying this question with methods that can actually plausibly get at causality. Meanwhile, these jokers are celebrated for making causal claims based on correlations while completely ignoring heritability, as if the strong genetic effects on these phenotypes were, by some miraculous process, orthogonal to the “toxic stressors” studied. It’s all so tiresome.
Some points to remember:
* Brain scan data alone do not contain more causal information than, say, behavioral data. In fact, brain scan data are generally less informative than behavioral data because the former are a (usually weak) proxy for the latter.
* Longitudinal brain scan data together with environmental exposure data do not establish causality either because the expression of genetic effects may be age-dependent.
* Controlling for SES will not lead to unbiased estimates. Often, controlling for SES will increase bias because SES is usually correlated with the error term.
* The best ways to study these questions are family designs (e.g. sibling comparisons) and genomic approaches (e.g. using ancestrally informative markers).
I think the black psychiatrist quoted meant something like “qualitatively” rather than “categorically.” This is something that I’ve noticed: the use by blacks of big words that don’t quite mean what they think they mean … if indeed they are even thinking of meaning, rather than just using them as a verbal “condiment.” It’s related to black “hyper-urbanism,” the attempt to correct perceived pronunciation and grammatical mistakes by inventing new mistakes: “OFF-ten” for “often,” (OFF-uhn), or “between you and I.”
Remember: vocabulary is (counterintuitively) one of the highest g-loaded IQ tests.
As usual, the proximate environmental causes of black behavior and dysfunction – their own parents, relatives, peers and neighbors that they spend nearly all their time around – are skipped right over in favor of society at large.
Obviously one of the major defects of our society is the total unwillingness to hold blacks to any level of accountability – it encourages cultural habits that are hugely destructive to blacks themselves and inflicts collateral damage on the nation at large.
I am not sure if people like Bill Maher will ever get redpilled enough to comment on that phenomenon, but that’s basically what it would take – people with national presence who are politically left of center to openly discuss black failures and what they owe to the rest of society before they have the standing to demand anything.
Look at Blacks of different SES: middle-class vs. ghetto blacks.
Look at Blacks whose genetic parents were ghetto Blacks but who were themselves adopted by middle-class families (Black or White).
There is this thing called the scientific method.Replies: @Spangel226, @AndrewR, @Feryl, @New Dealer, @Wizard of Oz, @AnotherDad, @Hypnotoad666
You have to control for white admixture which is rather….. Difficult. Black siblings can differ in phenotype when they even have two black parents, much less one non-white parent. American whites outside the Northeast are a much more homogenous population.
The average American black is 15-20% Northern European genetically. It is interesting though how mullato blacks have worse mental health than pure(er) blacks, and thus they may be smarter but not overall better off.
Then there’s the factor that per Ed Dutton, people who elope outside their race are more narcissistic and psychopathic as it indicates extreme lack of in group loyalty, particularly if it’s with blacks (as opposed to East Asians or the more whiteish of Hispanics). We also know that white women who elope with blacks tend to self-report a lot of disagreeable traits.
"It's God's quality control program!"
Normalized? That’s racist. They are saying that blacks are abnormal. You could get in big trouble for that.
But, putting aside the linguistic minefields, you can see that the researchers had a problem – the brains of black people are smaller than those of white people across the board, so how do you do a meaningful comparison and not one where blacks are just going to all clump up at the bottom on every measure? Why you “normalize” for estimated intracranial volume.
This is brilliant! We can do this for other measures like SAT and crime stats. Once you adjust for the size of their skulls, blacks are just as smart and non-violent as whites. Can we do this for other things? Once you “normalize” for % of fast twitch muscle, whites can run just as fast as West Africans, etc.?
Now if you or I tried to do this in some study where you were NOT trying to get to some praiseworthy predetermined outcome (in this case the goal is clearly to prove that, due to “structural racism”, blacks are under stress and this explains why their intellectual growth (if not their physical girth) is stunted, also, send more gibs) someone would call you on this sort of BS thumb on the scale “normalization”. But because they are doing it for a good cause, they are allowed to get away with such a massive rejiggling of the numbers.
Maybe it’s time to get rid of objectivity not only in journalism but also in science?
All these years arguing nature vs nurture when there’s actually a third great force in child development and civilizational development. It was always nature/nurture/whitey, with whitey being the predominant force, but only a force for evil.
Now that Nigeria has been independent for 60 years, does the quality of civilization in Nigeria tell us something about Nigerian nature or Nigerian nurture? No, it proves how we’ve underestimated the force of whiteness, and how it can operate from across oceans and through generations.
The Socialists/Democrats have been encouraging character disorder in blacks for generations.
Getting them to believe that all their problems are someone else’s fault leaves them paralyzed – helpless to fix their own problems – making them dependent on the Left/Dems.
The big black mark on blacks is they bought all this bullshit. A prima facie case that they are indeed defective.
The good folks of the Ivory Coast must spend the entirety of their days dodging bullets.
What else could explain the sub 60 IQ?
And that’s average, not lowest.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country
And the commentary on the data is wokelism at its finest.
The Vietnamese plant the rice.
The Cambodians watch it grow.
The Laotians listen to it grow.
Blacks are always laughing and twerkin and showing no signs of stress. They always livin’ in da moment and carefree. No worries.
I have a question for Steve:
If whites’ literal big brains at least partly account for their superior educational achievements, how does petite James Madison fit in? Although just 5’4″, he was one of the smartest and certainly one of the best-educated (in formal terms) of the Founding Fathers. Contemporary illustrations don’t show him with an unusually large head, so his “intracranial volume” couldn’t have been the same size as those of his confreres. So how did he do it?
That being said, pygmies have very low intelligence.Replies: @Race Engineer, @Corpse Tooth
1. Many actors are short with planetary heads, e.g. Tom Cruise and Ana de Armas. For some reason they look great on camera. I mean, really great on camera, like heart-stoppingly good-looking.
2. This raises the question of how an artist might portray funny-looking Framers.
3. We don't want no short people, 'round here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bfyS-S-IJs
He ran all questions by his 'hidden figure' Black slave Henry, of course. I thought everyone knew that.
The squeegee men are back, only now some have graduate degrees in Something from the University of Somewhere. From now on mugger money will be referred to as reparations.
He cheated – he used a smaller body.
What you’d need to do is study children’s brains over a number of years and correlate changes to the stress they endured in the interim.
My God, you have the damned effrontery to explain science to Harvard men?
Harvard has moved beyond science, into the sunlit uplands of cosmic knowledge of the greater good. Apologise, man!
When you have a rabid dog coming at you to kill you, you don’t stand still and declare that you want to do a study as to what caused this–you put the dog down.
Oh, go ahead and do your study–what possible changes can you make to fix this? LOL. Tougher laws? More lenient laws? They won’t listen to a damned thing that you say, and throw it all back in your face.
We were far smarter about this in 1823 and 1923 than we are now. I only wish that those people had been smart enough to move the problem back to Africa 100%.
Could it be that the researchers are using the “systemic racism” stuff as a smoke screen to conceal themselves from the DIE crowd, while they gather unwelcome data? Because they really do know about race.
-Discard
…began exploring a cognitive development study to dispel “this kind of folk belief that Black and White people have categorically different brains.”
So they started with a preconceived conclusion that fit a specific political agenda and worked assiduously to ensure that their “findings” supported that conclusion. Sorry, guys, that’s not how “research” works.
I’ve been shouting myself hoarse for a decade or more now demanding that some legitimate inquiry be conducted on what part significant inbreeding has on collective black dysfunction, but there is apparently no interest in peeling that onion.
Consider: The vast majority of black children in this country, particularly in the crowded cities, are born out of wedlock, following the typical negro courtship ritual of rutting willy-nilly and then saddling Uncle Sugar with the bill. Not only do few black children know who their biological fathers are, it is a safe bet that their biological mothers are not too terribly sure, either.
Given the negro male penchant for capping one another and engaging in other patently risky behaviors that manage to land roughly a quarter of them in prison during their most fruitful years, the relative paucity of available sires to brood sows coupled with their notorious fecundity means that in a given generation there are likely myriad half-siblings who are wholly unaware of their kinship. Within 15 years of birth, those randy revelers begin the process anew, very possibly mating with their own half-brothas and -sistas.
Time was, marriage between a man and a woman required a blood test to rule out any such unpleasantness, as it has been well known for millennia that incestuous relations are not conducive to producing viable offspring, human or otherwise. With that quaint old practice thoroughly cashiered in modern times, no one is minding the DNA store any longer. The result is the rise of a frighteningly huge underclass of patently useless wards of the state, existing under permanent custodial care, as the ghosts of Cloward and Piven squeal with delight.
Those two Columbia faculty were an evil pair. One, just once, I'd like to be proud of someone from my alma mater. OK, Lionel Trilling, Carl Woodring, but that was a long time ago.
Skull size is proportional to body size – otherwise dwarves would be retarded and giants would be super intelligent. We can also see this in dogs where St. Bernards are not smarter than miniature poodles. However, given two equal sized humans, the one with the larger skull will tend to be smarter.
That being said, pygmies have very low intelligence.
One of these guys has degrees from Harvard and Magdalen College, Oxford, and it’s not the Frenchman.
I've never loitered in a place where pygmies are brought up with such frequency. Could it be the influence of our beloved host? Did you hear a lot pygmy talk in the lunchroom at the National Geographic building? Where is that building?
Something Emmit Till’s brain probably lacked: neuron density.
That being said, pygmies have very low intelligence.Replies: @Race Engineer, @Corpse Tooth
One of these guys has degrees from Harvard and Magdalen College, Oxford, and it’s not the Frenchman.
Also, according to Steve, size matters. We’ve got big brains. There should be a parade float rolling down Colorado Boulevard dedicated to the differential betwixt white and black brains: the white brain will command the platform whilst the hilariously-sized black brain will be confined to a corner.
“Rap music is much worse though.”
Black mothers are the primary cause of small-brained black man dysfunction.
Jack D:
You are begging the question: assuming that people with larger skulls relative to their heights are smarter than those with smaller skulls. That doesn’t explain Madison at all. He was much smarter than most 5’4″ men of his age (and probably of our age as well), but there is no evidence that he had a bigger skull than most of his 5’4″ contemporaries. You have also used the weasel words “tend to be smarter.” How do you account for those (relatively) big-skulled people who aren’t smarter?
Finally, it’s probably true that miniature poodles are smarter than St. Bernards–because poodles of any size are the smartest dogs that I, for one, have ever encountered. But St. Bernards are actually famous for their huge heads relative to their body size, whereas poodles have relatively small heads. Doesn’t this suggest (and here I’m invoking Steve’s favorite rhetorical device, Occam’s Razor) that it’s what’s inside the skull and not the size of the skull itself, either relatively or absolutely, that determines intelligence?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-brain-size-matter1/
You also have the issue that only part of your brain involves higher functions that we call intelligence so you could have a large brain but have most of it devoted to other stuff. Dolphins have very large brains but probably a lot of it is devoted to processing the signals from their sonar system. This gives them capabilities that humans don't have (except that human intelligence allows us to build sonar machines) but are not what we would call "intelligence".
There are a lot of traits that are valid for groups but tell you nothing about individuals. As a group, E. Africans can run long distances faster than white people, so the top finishers in Olympic marathons tend to be E. African. But any individual E. African could be slower (or faster) than a typical E. African. People who are notable in any field (such as Madison) tend to be outliers - Madison's genius tells you nothing about the average intelligence of 5'4" individuals. Also note that average height was lower in the past due to difference in nutrition so in his age he wasn't particularly short.Replies: @jb, @Charlotte Allen, @Anonymous
Of course. Take actors for example: they tend to be large-headed and small-bodied. And in most actors there's not a lot going on inside those heads. Here's a corollary to the white brain/black brain theorem: It's well known that Irishmen have the brain size of a black man and the penis size of an Irishman. It's called the luck of the Irish.Replies: @Meretricious
You can’t make AA to be JUST about poverty without taking race into account, for two reasons:
1. There are a lot of poor people who are not black (e.g. recently arrived Asian immigrants, rural whites) and if you gave out the gibs based only on poverty instead of race they would get in on the act and cut out some of the black share.
2. The intelligence gap for blacks exists at at income levels. Blacks from the highest income group score lower than whites from the lowest. OTOH, if you were to cut high income blacks out of AA, low income blacks score so low that there’s no way that they could cope with the curriculum at say Harvard. The only way Harvard can take as many blacks as it wants is by taking a lot of high income blacks who are in no way “underprivileged”. If you look at Div I bball and fball colleges that DO take ghetto blacks to play ball, the only way they get them thru the academics is thru all sorts of ruses – special classes, tutors who actually do the work for them, etc.
That being said, pygmies have very low intelligence.Replies: @Race Engineer, @Corpse Tooth
“That being said, pygmies have very low intelligence.”
I’ve never loitered in a place where pygmies are brought up with such frequency. Could it be the influence of our beloved host? Did you hear a lot pygmy talk in the lunchroom at the National Geographic building? Where is that building?
Napoleon was short as well, it’s proportional to body size, also the parts of the brain more relevant to intelligence may be proportionally larger in smart individuals even if the brain size overall is the same as a person with average intelligence.
Look at Blacks of different SES: middle-class vs. ghetto blacks.
Look at Blacks whose genetic parents were ghetto Blacks but who were themselves adopted by middle-class families (Black or White).
There is this thing called the scientific method.Replies: @Spangel226, @AndrewR, @Feryl, @New Dealer, @Wizard of Oz, @AnotherDad, @Hypnotoad666
If you are trying to explain a set of observations, you can’t proceed by considering only a single hypothesis (racism!). Any hypothesis will seem to have some evidence for it. You proceed by considering multiple hypotheses, and tentatively favoring the one that explains more of the observations than others.
Before George Floyd.
Skull size is proven to be CORRELATED with intelligence but it’s not a lock step relationship. The correlation is about .3 or .4 which is actually rather strong (it’s hard to find really strong correlations with anything) but still leaves you a lot of room for other factors which may (cough) outweigh brain mass.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-brain-size-matter1/
You also have the issue that only part of your brain involves higher functions that we call intelligence so you could have a large brain but have most of it devoted to other stuff. Dolphins have very large brains but probably a lot of it is devoted to processing the signals from their sonar system. This gives them capabilities that humans don’t have (except that human intelligence allows us to build sonar machines) but are not what we would call “intelligence”.
There are a lot of traits that are valid for groups but tell you nothing about individuals. As a group, E. Africans can run long distances faster than white people, so the top finishers in Olympic marathons tend to be E. African. But any individual E. African could be slower (or faster) than a typical E. African. People who are notable in any field (such as Madison) tend to be outliers – Madison’s genius tells you nothing about the average intelligence of 5’4″ individuals. Also note that average height was lower in the past due to difference in nutrition so in his age he wasn’t particularly short.
But my point is that correlation--big heads and high intelligence--doesn't tell us a lot. The most you can say is that people with big heads relative to their body size are possibly more likely to be smarter than people with small heads. It still leaves open the question of how small-headed people can be smart, too, if cranial capacity is important to intelligence. Cardinal Richelieu, at least in his portraits, had a tiny head.Replies: @jb
“Doesn’t this suggest … that it’s what’s inside the skull and not the size of the skull itself, either relatively or absolutely, that determines intelligence?”
Of course. Take actors for example: they tend to be large-headed and small-bodied. And in most actors there’s not a lot going on inside those heads. Here’s a corollary to the white brain/black brain theorem: It’s well known that Irishmen have the brain size of a black man and the penis size of an Irishman. It’s called the luck of the Irish.
I think Einstein was 5’8”, Gödel 5’6”, Von Neumann 5’7”, Fermi 5’6”, et al. It seems geniuses are below average in height.
L-R, Stigler, Friedman, Galbraith:
https://external-preview.redd.it/P5hGvfcAPICWIdw-pUQ3HRBxRAd3E2lM8NJ7XMR0kmw.jpg?auto=webp&v=enabled&s=990e59cc4c7335aca501453baf644e8d25ec7dffReplies: @Charlotte Allen, @Unladen Swallow
Height is weakly but positively correlated with IQ.Replies: @Samfran
There have been studies of what happens when poor black kids are adopted by middle class or wealthy white families. Their IQ is higher than kids who were raised in the ‘hood.
Amazing but true, growing up in a stressful environment with uneducated parents is less conducive to mental development.
It is not known how much of the observed IQ differences between different populations is due to environmental factors, either in the womb or after birth.
Nor do we have a good way to “solve” the problem. There is no evidence that Head Start type programs do much or even any good in the long term. And quite a lot of the school reform programs are an attempt to have over stressed teachers make up for problems with environmental or genetic factors that have nothing to do with school racism.
If a white child lives in poverty, it’s because his parents are stupid, as probably were his grandparents and great-grandparents.
That is pretty much the summation of HBD.
The devotees of human biodiversity will triumphantly display their charts of non-overlapping bell curves of black and white IQ scores and claim that this validates everything they've been saying, seemingly unwilling to understand that the mere data is compatible with any number of explanations, and that the superstructure of evolutionary psychology that they've adduced to describe it all is simply their own fancy and, as a real scientific hypothesis, is already ruled out on other grounds.
In the mind of an HBDer, the following ideas seem self-evidently true. If a black person commits a beastly crime, it is characteristic of the whole race. His race predisposes him to do such things; it is a "black crime." Intelligence is highly inheritable, unless you're an intelligent black person, in which case your descendants are doomed to suffer from "mean reversion" and will not inherit your high IQ. All the geniuses produced by the white race, meanwhile, are characteristic of that race; it is "white genius," which somehow imparts a sacramental character indelebilis to everyone born of European ancestry. White violent criminals are mostly passed over in silence, unless they are sexy psychopaths and serial killers, in which case their only real fault is "hypermasculinity"---a genetic cross they must bear so that the rest of us can benefit from their genes for language and abstraction in gentler, non-autistic combinations.
That anyone would believe such patently self-serving nonsense is puzzling, but Sailer has made an entire career out of this, and his devoted fanbase returns here, day after day, to hear the same bromides and to make the same complaints that have all already been said a thousand times over. Clearly, they are unhappy with the status quo and want to change something, but what? Their principal antagonist seems to be "The Narrative," i.e. a deeply entrenched cultural and institutional belief that all races are equal in every respect and would behave as such were it not for the existence of "racism." The Narrative is the unacceptable boogeyman they propose to combat with the righteous sword of HBD.
Exactly what specific policies they hope to see changed in the wake of their battle is unclear, for every cultural artefact supposedly spawned by The Narrative is equally compatible with their own version of the story, as I and others have pointed out countless times. Let's assume for argument's sake that HBD is 100% true, and let's imagine that the whole world will be converted to it tomorrow morning. It does not follow from this that progressives need alter their policies one wit. Affirmative Action, disparate impact, the mollycoddling of black criminals, and the whole suite of Civil Rights Era legislation could be argued in favor of precisely because blacks are genetically inferior and need a leg up. It is the inverse of the Vonnegut story; we can call it "Harrison DeBergeron."
HBDers don't have a plan for what to do, they just want to see The Narrative destroyed by whatever means possible. Ever quick to flourish their bell curves, they demand that all this talk of equality cease in the presence of their almighty data. This request we should grant them wholeheartedly. There is no equality. For whatever reason, we live in a time and place where blacks seem to commit more than their fair share of crimes and have less than their fair share of successes. There is no reason why this fact needs to be elevated into a political issue. Let the busybodies of both sides be silent.
Progressives need to stop trying to close the gap with failed and unlawful social policies, and Alt-Righters need to stop trying to explain the gap with pseudoscience. On the one hand, policies such as Affirmative Action and disparate impact legislation are complete violations of the natural law and need to be rescinded forthwith; on the other hand, racialist reasoning which, if carried to its logical extreme, would hold that blacks aren't really responsible for the crimes they commit due to their racial handicap, also needs to be struck away. If race is the ultimate arbiter in human affairs, then nobody is responsible for anything. If people are responsible for what they do, notwithstanding the accidents of birth and circumstance, then race is just one more inscrutable factor in the great tapestry of existence, which no man can claim to see with perfect clarity. We will see it at the Last Judgment, and not before.
We already have the juridical framework to set the matter aright: Get rid of all the legal and quasi-legal racial spoils systems (they are unconstitutional anyway) and hold everyone equally accountable before the law. If that isn't good enough for you then nothing ever will be, for that is the best that mortals can do.Replies: @Truth, @gail
I’m reminded of Mario Capecchi.
What do you want them to say? “We found out the 19th century racists were right all along. These people are stupid and impulsive because of inalienable human genetics. There is no solution besides eugenics or just shipping them back to Africa.” I mean–that’s basically correct, but scientists have bills to pay, too.
Are African American children really living in a more traumatic setting than Germany in 1945?
Yet post-war German society didn’t seem to exhibit half the pathologies and dysfunction of urban America.
Look at Blacks of different SES: middle-class vs. ghetto blacks.
Look at Blacks whose genetic parents were ghetto Blacks but who were themselves adopted by middle-class families (Black or White).
There is this thing called the scientific method.Replies: @Spangel226, @AndrewR, @Feryl, @New Dealer, @Wizard of Oz, @AnotherDad, @Hypnotoad666
it would be desirable to look at West Indian and African (Bantu especially) populations as well. Which reminds me to express the hope that, eventually, Steve will get round to tackling the wuestion of the significance of caste in Africa, and indeed differential enslavement. Wouldn’t you sell your dumber and more troublesome slaves to the foreign traders?
https://www.mcleanhospital.org/profile/nathaniel-harnett
https://icd.umn.edu/people/dumor003/
She/Her/Hers has a BS degree, how appropriate.
Do the “stressors” also contribute to the growth of fast twitch muscle fiber?
Or any other racial based differences?
The study is interesting and a worthy effort on it’s merits but it’s tiresome that everything is weaponized. Why weren’t children of different racial backgrounds in the same type of situations included?
What about lions and hyenas making a racket at night?
Look at Blacks of different SES: middle-class vs. ghetto blacks.
Look at Blacks whose genetic parents were ghetto Blacks but who were themselves adopted by middle-class families (Black or White).
There is this thing called the scientific method.Replies: @Spangel226, @AndrewR, @Feryl, @New Dealer, @Wizard of Oz, @AnotherDad, @Hypnotoad666
This is not science. It is politics. Rather openly stated at that.
There’s nothing in the data to “suggest” that, unless suggests just means “hey it could be”
His analysis underscores… I.e. his assertions underscores the need for the his policy preferences.
Some scattered comments on short people with large heads:
1. Many actors are short with planetary heads, e.g. Tom Cruise and Ana de Armas. For some reason they look great on camera. I mean, really great on camera, like heart-stoppingly good-looking.
2. This raises the question of how an artist might portray funny-looking Framers.
3. We don’t want no short people, ’round here:
The average American black is 15-20% Northern European genetically. It is interesting though how mullato blacks have worse mental health than pure(er) blacks, and thus they may be smarter but not overall better off.
Then there's the factor that per Ed Dutton, people who elope outside their race are more narcissistic and psychopathic as it indicates extreme lack of in group loyalty, particularly if it's with blacks (as opposed to East Asians or the more whiteish of Hispanics). We also know that white women who elope with blacks tend to self-report a lot of disagreeable traits.Replies: @Mike Tre, @Charlesz Martel, @Truth, @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco
“The average American black is 15-20% Northern European genetically. ”
Everybody here has heard this already and even if it is true, which I am skeptical of, it’s by all practical measures irrelevant. All it does is serve some sort of egalitarian civ nat world view that we’re all more like each other than we think, and race is only skin deep, blah blah blah.
If it looks, walks, talks like a negro, it’s a negro. The really important people can debate skin hue all they want while the cities burn.
They can all return to the ample bosom of mother Afro-ca. That includes the likes of all sportsball heros like Patrick My-homies and their coal burning mothers.
Did they have a control group? Did they bother to look at white children living in poverty?
Oh, that’s right – silly me – nobody cares about white children. If their brain development is stunted they’re just stupid.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-brain-size-matter1/
You also have the issue that only part of your brain involves higher functions that we call intelligence so you could have a large brain but have most of it devoted to other stuff. Dolphins have very large brains but probably a lot of it is devoted to processing the signals from their sonar system. This gives them capabilities that humans don't have (except that human intelligence allows us to build sonar machines) but are not what we would call "intelligence".
There are a lot of traits that are valid for groups but tell you nothing about individuals. As a group, E. Africans can run long distances faster than white people, so the top finishers in Olympic marathons tend to be E. African. But any individual E. African could be slower (or faster) than a typical E. African. People who are notable in any field (such as Madison) tend to be outliers - Madison's genius tells you nothing about the average intelligence of 5'4" individuals. Also note that average height was lower in the past due to difference in nutrition so in his age he wasn't particularly short.Replies: @jb, @Charlotte Allen, @Anonymous
Another complication is that skull size and height are not tightly correlated. I’m pretty short, and my head doesn’t look in any way disproportionate to my body, but my hat size (if I wore one) is “large”. There’s really no way to determine how big Madison’s head was simply by looking at contemporary illustrations, you’d need to have the actual skull.
We need the Dukes to look into this.
Given that this study’s focus is associating alleged trauma, environmental stress, and forms of racism with serious behavioral disorders and brain structure/size differences in children, it’s curious that Blacks! consistently have vastly lower suicide rates than whites. And, it’s also curious that Blacks! consistently have the highest reported sense of Self Esteem, even as children and adolescents.
This suggests that all of the alleged trauma and stress affect the populations very differently, and that structural brain differences may be caused by variables (heritable) that are operating independently of the author’s claims of adolescent trauma and stress.
https://sprc.org/scope/racial-ethnic-disparities
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263756/
LOLed at the wrong comment, should clean my glasses.
These were going to be OT on the previous thread, but suddenly they’re on-topic with this one.
Miami Black leaders apologize to Gov. Ron DeSantis after a member called him racist
When was the last time this happened? 1973? (Walter Williams’s absolution cards don’t count.)
Why are White People so Stupid?
What this shows–beyond the corruption of Harvard, the academy and increasing including “science”–is:
We can not maintain Western civilization without returning to a understanding of HBD.
Such understanding was not required in traditional societies, where people lived with their own kind. You just assumed the people “over the hills” were trouble and went about your business.
We have had large multi-ethnic polities before–the Romans, the Ottomans, etc. But the general state paradigm was “pay your taxes and don’t cause trouble–or else.” “Else” meant they’d march their legions over and kick your ass. People lived with their own kind. And there was no pretense all the various peoples were the same. And in any multi-ethnic trading city people would have laughed at such naivete.
America thrived, despite our “legacy of slavery” due to a self-confident white majority, enforcing Anglo-Protestant cultural norms. No one thought whites, blacks, native Indians–or Chinese or Mexicans–were all the same, other than in the Christian “all God’s children” sense. Heck, people didn’t even think all the white groups were the same.
Only since the War and the broad Jewish attack on Anglo biological science (and heretofore basic barnyard common sense) have people believed–or been forced to parrot–all this anti-genetic blank slate nonsense. Basically a justification for massive elite–i.e. heavily Jewish–“management” (bossing and grifting) of “society”. And every decade–now every year!–the hard logical core of it is stated more and more openly: Since everyone is the same, but the outcomes are not the same, your society is flawed, corrupt, illegitimate, evil and must be destroyed–and rebuilt and managed by us, your betters.
A this point we’d be better off living under the Ottomans. At least with them you paid your taxes, then they left your community alone to mind its own affairs.
We need “conservative” politicians willing to state these basic HBD truths. “Not every person, not every group is the same. And demanding that everyone have the same outcome or else society needs “fixing” is a recipe for a brutish totalitarian nightmare without end.”
"we’d be better off living under the Ottomans. At least with them you paid your taxes, then they left your community alone"
Oh no no no, my friend, they most certainly did not leave you alone. Look up "devsirme". Look up the Christian boys kidnapped, castrated and turned into dancing whore-clowns (I forget the Turkish word for this.) Look up the unimaginably miserable existence of a Christian rowing slave in the Ottoman galleys. Makes dem ole cotton plantations look like Cancun.
Look at Blacks of different SES: middle-class vs. ghetto blacks.
Look at Blacks whose genetic parents were ghetto Blacks but who were themselves adopted by middle-class families (Black or White).
There is this thing called the scientific method.Replies: @Spangel226, @AndrewR, @Feryl, @New Dealer, @Wizard of Oz, @AnotherDad, @Hypnotoad666
They found that parental income was the best predictor of gray matter and concluded that lack of income therefore shrinks your brain. For their next study maybe they can show how correlations prove that umbrellas cause rain.
Amazing but true, growing up in a stressful environment with uneducated parents is less conducive to mental development.
It is not known how much of the observed IQ differences between different populations is due to environmental factors, either in the womb or after birth.
Nor do we have a good way to “solve” the problem. There is no evidence that Head Start type programs do much or even any good in the long term. And quite a lot of the school reform programs are an attempt to have over stressed teachers make up for problems with environmental or genetic factors that have nothing to do with school racism.Replies: @Jack D, @rebel yell
In fact, it is just as high as their white siblings. Oh, no wait, it’s not. No one can put an exact number on it, but roughly speaking ABOUT half of the Gap could be explained environmentally (note that environmental measure meaning that you take every kid away from his black parents and give him to rich white people to raise – unthinkable) and the other half (the half we are never allowed to talk about) is genetic and unfixable without even more unthinkable eugenic measures.
Or else we could just give every black person $5 million and call it even. At the rate we are going, this is the more likely outcome vs. doing anything that would actually close the Gap.
Agree, except for this part:
“we’d be better off living under the Ottomans. At least with them you paid your taxes, then they left your community alone”
Oh no no no, my friend, they most certainly did not leave you alone. Look up “devsirme”. Look up the Christian boys kidnapped, castrated and turned into dancing whore-clowns (I forget the Turkish word for this.) Look up the unimaginably miserable existence of a Christian rowing slave in the Ottoman galleys. Makes dem ole cotton plantations look like Cancun.
Amazing but true, growing up in a stressful environment with uneducated parents is less conducive to mental development.
It is not known how much of the observed IQ differences between different populations is due to environmental factors, either in the womb or after birth.
Nor do we have a good way to “solve” the problem. There is no evidence that Head Start type programs do much or even any good in the long term. And quite a lot of the school reform programs are an attempt to have over stressed teachers make up for problems with environmental or genetic factors that have nothing to do with school racism.Replies: @Jack D, @rebel yell
I don’t think this is true. Were those studies well done, replicated? Read Judith Harris’ book. She showed that parental upbringing and social/economic class account for none of the differences in outcomes among people. Genetics accounts for half or more of the differences in our outcomes in life and the random differences in our environments account for the rest. Systemic environmental differences, such as parents, economic class, etc, account for zero.
The average American black is 15-20% Northern European genetically. It is interesting though how mullato blacks have worse mental health than pure(er) blacks, and thus they may be smarter but not overall better off.
Then there's the factor that per Ed Dutton, people who elope outside their race are more narcissistic and psychopathic as it indicates extreme lack of in group loyalty, particularly if it's with blacks (as opposed to East Asians or the more whiteish of Hispanics). We also know that white women who elope with blacks tend to self-report a lot of disagreeable traits.Replies: @Mike Tre, @Charlesz Martel, @Truth, @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco
As a late friend of mine used to say about White women who miscegenate-:
“It’s God’s quality control program!”
Of course. Take actors for example: they tend to be large-headed and small-bodied. And in most actors there's not a lot going on inside those heads. Here's a corollary to the white brain/black brain theorem: It's well known that Irishmen have the brain size of a black man and the penis size of an Irishman. It's called the luck of the Irish.Replies: @Meretricious
Little bitch, I’m 100% Irish. I bet I have 2 SDs on you
Junk science.
Terrible experimental set up.
Only if you did similar studies on African children in Africa, with samples from conflict areas and non conflict. Or Middle East with Lebanon/Syria versus say Jordan and Dubai. Or in India with brains and caste differentials, highest versus lowest.
Does “conflict” alone make any difference. Brain “volume”, etc.
And to single out a very vague adult concept “racism” which has little independent meaning other than context and imaginary assumptions. Totally fake science.
As iSteve’s essay notes, you start talking about racial brain “differences” and pretty soon you end up with pretty “racist” conclusions unless you carefully pick and choose.
In adulthood there was no difference in outcomes for the death camp survivors vs their suburban-raised siblings.
Genes, genes, genes...
This form of laundering means that the Press will have the figleaf that it needs in order to present your politics as irrefutable, unrebutted "news" and "science."Replies: @Jack D
Terrible experimental set up.
Only if you did similar studies on African children in Africa, with samples from conflict areas and non conflict. Or Middle East with Lebanon/Syria versus say Jordan and Dubai. Or in India with brains and caste differentials, highest versus lowest.
Does "conflict" alone make any difference. Brain "volume", etc.
And to single out a very vague adult concept "racism" which has little independent meaning other than context and imaginary assumptions. Totally fake science.
As iSteve's essay notes, you start talking about racial brain "differences" and pretty soon you end up with pretty "racist" conclusions unless you carefully pick and choose.Replies: @rebel yell, @Alec Leamas (working from home)
Judith Harris cites a study of siblings who were separated by war while young – one group was raised by adoptive parents or relatives away from the war zone and the other group of siblings were raised in Nazi death camps (they survived).
In adulthood there was no difference in outcomes for the death camp survivors vs their suburban-raised siblings.
Genes, genes, genes…
Or, to use the correct british pronunciation, “maffs”.
Yet post-war German society didn't seem to exhibit half the pathologies and dysfunction of urban America.Replies: @Mr. Anon
Same goes for Japan, Poland, Russia, etc.
We often hear that fatherlessness is the majority circumstance in the black community, but I don’t think that’s quite right. There would be a deficit in the family from the total absence of a father, but black family structure is such that what black children endure is a serial rotation of men partnered with their mothers in their homes who are not their fathers, which is far, far worse than simply the lack of a father. There are instances like with Shaquille O’Neal where the absence of his biological father was mitigated and improved upon by a stable, caring if strict stepfather for the duration of his childhood, but that’s the very rare exception rather than the rule. The rule is much more likely the presence of a new tyrant from time to time who sees the children as obstacles at best, and at worst engages in active abuse of the other men’s children in the home. So there’s probably endemic abuse of different kinds in the black home by strange men, and you get PTSD from the constant fear that some man living in your home is going to “go off” at any minute and so forth. By the time black boys are teens, they demonstrate the sort of oppositional defiance which makes them very difficult to manage tending towards dangerous – if you learn that all authority and especially male authority is capricious and cruel, you’re likely to end up in dust ups with police that end poorly for you.
I suppose one reason that equally poor Hispanics don’t commit crimes as frequently as you’d predict if you believe that poverty causes crime is that Hispanics tend to retain intact families much more often, and they have broader familial support systems. In other words, Hispanics are more likely to receive beatings from their own fathers rather than a series of strange men who happen to be having sex with their mothers at any given time.
I don’t know how you solve this but it seems to me that the incidence of abuse by stepfathers/mothers’ boyfriends has probably increased in correlation with the disintegration of intact families across all demographics, with blacks experiencing this first and worst. Obviously judging by the black experience, antipoverty programs coupled with a culturally broad emphasis on women’s fulfillment would only serve to exacerbate these problems. Women’s liberation from all social and family bonds is presumed to be an unalloyed good in modern U.S. political and legal thinking, and the welfare state seems to be back with a vengeance following a respite in the 1990s. So I imagine that addressing the real causes of these problems is near impossible.
-DiscardReplies: @Alec Leamas (working from home)
Not having any Homo ergaster admixture and having ancestors who survived in extremely cold climates helps you be more successful in life. Growing up around people with those qualities makes things easier, but it doesn’t raise your IQ. Also, once you’re at the First World level, additional money doesn’t make you smarter.
Terrible experimental set up.
Only if you did similar studies on African children in Africa, with samples from conflict areas and non conflict. Or Middle East with Lebanon/Syria versus say Jordan and Dubai. Or in India with brains and caste differentials, highest versus lowest.
Does "conflict" alone make any difference. Brain "volume", etc.
And to single out a very vague adult concept "racism" which has little independent meaning other than context and imaginary assumptions. Totally fake science.
As iSteve's essay notes, you start talking about racial brain "differences" and pretty soon you end up with pretty "racist" conclusions unless you carefully pick and choose.Replies: @rebel yell, @Alec Leamas (working from home)
One of the cool things about your side owning academia at every level while excluding anyone with the slightest heterodox opinion is the ability to dress political arguments up as “science” and shield them from review, comment, and criticism. No one who might be the least bit skeptical (or who is dedicated to the integrity of the field) will have the funding and the institutional backing to attempt to replicate your “study.”
This form of laundering means that the Press will have the figleaf that it needs in order to present your politics as irrefutable, unrebutted “news” and “science.”
There is an unholy trinity of Leftist Media, Leftist Academics and Leftist Politicians who all
conspirecollaborate with each other. This same trinity was supposed to get gas ranges banned but the conspiracy got broken up before it could gain momentum. Leftist Academics do so bogus (government funded BTW) "study" and then the study gets publicized by the Leftist Press and then Leftist Politicians implement legislation based upon the "science". Follow the science, people!Replies: @Charlotte Allen, @Recently Based, @Alec Leamas (working from home), @Art DecoBecause what correlates with intelligence is not brain size,but rather the size and convolutions of the pre-frontal cortex. A man with a smaller brain can have a larger PFC than a man with a larger brain. Football players tend to have large, mesomorphic skulls, but they are usually not the sharpest pencils in the box.
Also, the correlation between brain size and intelligence is not linear and perfect. Size is important because the total number of neuronal synapsis that you have matter for understanding and problem-solving, but it’s not the only factor. Speed and accuracy of neuronal communication also matters, and that is not related to the number of synapsis. It’s more related to brain metabolisn. For instance, people that carry the Epsilon 4 of the Apolipoprotein E gene tend to have poorer cognitive performance due to impaired glucose uptake in the brain.
“All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.” –George J. Stigler
L-R, Stigler, Friedman, Galbraith:
Can anyone tell me how to format a text hyperlink in UR comments? Thanks.
You're a card, you gotta be dealt with.Replies: @New Dealer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink#HTML
When needed, substitute the wanted URL (web address, minus quotes) and the wanted visible text between the closing > angle brackets < .
Test:
https://www.unz.com/author/steve-sailer/If you want your link to have different text, you need to do the [a href="URL">text</a], but with less than sign and greater than sign instead of [ and ].Replies: @Ralph L
Hee hee. Your man used “great” and “economists” in the same sentence.
You’re a card, you gotta be dealt with.
The food shortages right after WWII permanently damaged the health of those born 1944-1946, for example they are shorter than those born right before and after.
I have a big head, too–can’t really fit into standard women’s hats that don’t have some give. But then again, I’m tall, and the rest of my bones are big.
1. First use the opening carrot to start the link <.
2. Then type the lowercase letter a, followed by a space, then type title=”.” href=”. (The string href is followed immediately by an equal sign, which is followed immediately by an opening quotation mark.)
3. After the quotation mark, copy and paste the link you want the text to go to.
4. Use the closing quotation mark immediately after the link, and then use the closing carrot >.
5. Immediately after the closing carrot, type the text that you wish to appear as the link. You type it exactly the way you want it to appear. You can even use secondary html tags inside the text if you want your link to be bolded or italicized. You can use special characters, too.
6. Now you’re ready to close the html tag. Use the opening carrot <, followed by the forward slash /, followed by the lowercase a, followed by the closing carrot >.
7. Now you have a linked text. It will appear that way in the comment preview if you did it right.
8. If my instructions were unclear, you can also read about it here. (See what I did there?)
step 1: everything that causes blacks to be unequal is due to racism.
step 2: everything that causes blacks not to be significantly better by all measures than whites is due to racism
L-R, Stigler, Friedman, Galbraith:
https://external-preview.redd.it/P5hGvfcAPICWIdw-pUQ3HRBxRAd3E2lM8NJ7XMR0kmw.jpg?auto=webp&v=enabled&s=990e59cc4c7335aca501453baf644e8d25ec7dffReplies: @Charlotte Allen, @Unladen Swallow
Friedman does have a pretty big head relative to his size. Interesting that Stigler considered Galbraith a shortie.
He also had a pretty big head relative to his worth as a human being.Replies: @Art Deco
That is pretty much the summation of HBD.Replies: @Rich, @Intelligent Dasein
Yeah, no White guy ever lost his business because of illness or economic downturns. No White kid’s parents ever got laid off or died. What we do know is that poor White kids still score higher on IQ tests than wealthy black kids. Interesting that. Funny thing is you grew up in a black neighborhood so you know the truth. There’s a reason you moved out, isn’t there?
Those were average heights or nearly so.
Height is weakly but positively correlated with IQ.
Some points to remember:
* Brain scan data alone do not contain more causal information than, say, behavioral data. In fact, brain scan data are generally less informative than behavioral data because the former are a (usually weak) proxy for the latter.
* Longitudinal brain scan data together with environmental exposure data do not establish causality either because the expression of genetic effects may be age-dependent.
* Controlling for SES will not lead to unbiased estimates. Often, controlling for SES will increase bias because SES is usually correlated with the error term.
* The best ways to study these questions are family designs (e.g. sibling comparisons) and genomic approaches (e.g. using ancestrally informative markers).Replies: @Recently Based
+1000
It’s comical — You could literally replace any of their variables for grey matter with the variable “darkness of skin pigmentation” and get very similar statistical results. (I mean that literally, not figuratively). Would they then conclude that childhood trauma causes skin to darken?
“Friedman does have a pretty big head relative to his size.”
He also had a pretty big head relative to his worth as a human being.
https://www.mcleanhospital.org/sites/default/files/styles/headshot/public/2022-01/HarnettHeadshot198Oct272021.jpg?itok=a9epB6lLReplies: @Element59, @kaganovitch
And then there’s this one:
https://icd.umn.edu/people/dumor003/
She/Her/Hers has a BS degree, how appropriate.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-brain-size-matter1/
You also have the issue that only part of your brain involves higher functions that we call intelligence so you could have a large brain but have most of it devoted to other stuff. Dolphins have very large brains but probably a lot of it is devoted to processing the signals from their sonar system. This gives them capabilities that humans don't have (except that human intelligence allows us to build sonar machines) but are not what we would call "intelligence".
There are a lot of traits that are valid for groups but tell you nothing about individuals. As a group, E. Africans can run long distances faster than white people, so the top finishers in Olympic marathons tend to be E. African. But any individual E. African could be slower (or faster) than a typical E. African. People who are notable in any field (such as Madison) tend to be outliers - Madison's genius tells you nothing about the average intelligence of 5'4" individuals. Also note that average height was lower in the past due to difference in nutrition so in his age he wasn't particularly short.Replies: @jb, @Charlotte Allen, @Anonymous
Madison was America’s shortest president. Even among his contemporaries he was short. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were 6’2″, and James Monroe, who succeeded Madison, was 6’0″. Those are impressive heights for a supposed era of bad nutrition. And how badly nourished could Virginia planters have been? Jefferson, my visit to Monticello informed me, had a cellar stuffed with hams.
But my point is that correlation–big heads and high intelligence–doesn’t tell us a lot. The most you can say is that people with big heads relative to their body size are possibly more likely to be smarter than people with small heads. It still leaves open the question of how small-headed people can be smart, too, if cranial capacity is important to intelligence. Cardinal Richelieu, at least in his portraits, had a tiny head.
White children living in poverty are enriched by black children living in poverty.
Copy the example linked below and save it in a text edit program:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink#HTML
When needed, substitute the wanted URL (web address, minus quotes) and the wanted visible text between the closing > angle brackets < .
The map of IQ by country follows observed reality with the exception of Cambodia: 99.75, higher than the US? I’ve been to Cambodia and that score is not possible. There’s a saying in SE Asia to illustrate the difference in initiative among 3 geographically close but culturally distinct countries.
The Vietnamese plant the rice.
The Cambodians watch it grow.
The Laotians listen to it grow.
If Black children begin life with less gray matter in their brains, might that lead to a byproduct of “toxic stress” for proximate Blacks and Whites, creating an adverse feedback loop as they age?
No, it’s that he considered Galbraith a bad economist. It was likely just a joke though.
The word games played by The Cathedral here are fascinating (and typical).
Note the rhetorical ratchet as they proceed from the actual claims in the statistical section of the paper up to the media assertions that 99% of the people who learn about this will read (bold added):
From the Results section of the paper: Childhood adversity was associated with gray matter volume in the caudal anterior cingulate, caudal middle frontal gyrus, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, medial orbitofrontal cortex, pars opercularis, pars orbitalis, rostral anterior cingulate, rostral middle frontal gyrus, superior frontal cortex, frontal pole, insula, and amygdala (Table 3).
From the Discussion section of the paper: Taken together, our findings highlight the impact that disparities in early-life adversity have on race- related differences in the structure of neural circuitry associated with PTSD and other trauma- and stress-related disorders. One way to conceptualize the present findings is that a significant portion of the gray matter volume differences reflect racial disparities in toxic stress.
One of the authors quoted in a MedPage piece on the study: The disproportionate burden of structural inequities that we place on some groups has measurable impacts on their brain, and these impacts begin even in kids as young as 9 and 10 years old,” he said.
The opening of the linked CNN piece: Black children living in poverty face increased instances of stress and trauma that can alter their brain development, a new study found.
At no point does anybody come out make the falsifiable claim “Stress causes blacks to have smaller brains than whites,” but they keep inching closer and closer to implying this in a way that can always be walked back if challenged.
Height is weakly but positively correlated with IQ.Replies: @Samfran
John Maynard Keynes stood 6′ 7″.
These studies can be contrived to get the desired answer.
They cannot avoid the more interesting fact that Sub-Saharan Africa has seen extremely limited cognitively-based development over the past few thousand years. In other words a person can walk from anywhere in Africa to the early centers of civilization in the Mediterranean and Middle East, yet only limited cognitive progress has been made by the various groups of African people (as far as I have read). The hard earned knowledge created by earlier civilizations has diffused into Africa on a very limited basis. This issue predates European Colonialism by a very long time.
Maybe there are good explanations for this other than low IQ, mental capacity and associated time preference. I wish someone here would publish these explanations. Some that I have come across: wild animals–bogus, parasites–bogus, evil white man–bogus, evil moslems–bogus, plagues and famine–bogus. Is there a compelling cognitive aspect to the R-K issue?
Contact with Europe was very limited until the age of exploration, especially not into the interior which was not reached until well into the 19th century. The main obstacle was that white people would die due to tropical diseases.
But yes, Africans basically missed out on the 10,000 year explosion and it shows. Note though that Africa was not in the Stone Age. They did have iron making capability starting around 500 BC, unlike Amerindians. It's not clear that they learned this from the north or whether they figured this out on their own but probably the former as their techniques were quite different than European ones. Oddly, they developed iron ahead of copper and copper was highly prized and used for jewelry, etc.
LOL
So they started with a preconceived conclusion that fit a specific political agenda and worked assiduously to ensure that their "findings" supported that conclusion. Sorry, guys, that's not how "research" works.
I've been shouting myself hoarse for a decade or more now demanding that some legitimate inquiry be conducted on what part significant inbreeding has on collective black dysfunction, but there is apparently no interest in peeling that onion.
Consider: The vast majority of black children in this country, particularly in the crowded cities, are born out of wedlock, following the typical negro courtship ritual of rutting willy-nilly and then saddling Uncle Sugar with the bill. Not only do few black children know who their biological fathers are, it is a safe bet that their biological mothers are not too terribly sure, either.
Given the negro male penchant for capping one another and engaging in other patently risky behaviors that manage to land roughly a quarter of them in prison during their most fruitful years, the relative paucity of available sires to brood sows coupled with their notorious fecundity means that in a given generation there are likely myriad half-siblings who are wholly unaware of their kinship. Within 15 years of birth, those randy revelers begin the process anew, very possibly mating with their own half-brothas and -sistas.
Time was, marriage between a man and a woman required a blood test to rule out any such unpleasantness, as it has been well known for millennia that incestuous relations are not conducive to producing viable offspring, human or otherwise. With that quaint old practice thoroughly cashiered in modern times, no one is minding the DNA store any longer. The result is the rise of a frighteningly huge underclass of patently useless wards of the state, existing under permanent custodial care, as the ghosts of Cloward and Piven squeal with delight.Replies: @additionalMike, @Elli
If you look at what is happening to this country right now, it appears that George Soros understands the Cloward and Piven strategy very well, and he is making it work.
Those two Columbia faculty were an evil pair. One, just once, I’d like to be proud of someone from my alma mater. OK, Lionel Trilling, Carl Woodring, but that was a long time ago.
Oh! But Stigler (if that’s he in the photo) was pretty tall–at least compared to Friedman.
You're a card, you gotta be dealt with.Replies: @New Dealer
You’re responding to someone else’s comment, not mine.
Wasn’t there a study that indicated that middle class and upper class black children have a higher crime rate than poor white children?
Big brains make you smarter. As usual, it’s been well documented in the animal kingdom, but scientists start getting weird when the findings are matched with human subjects.
Below is a happy study easily concluding big brains always matter… in ANIMALS.
I’ll spare you the scientific flaming hoop show of studies trying to conclude that it couldn’t possibly be so amongst humans, because weird reasons.
https://www.livescience.com/53548-animals-with-bigger-brains-smarter.html
They cannot avoid the more interesting fact that Sub-Saharan Africa has seen extremely limited cognitively-based development over the past few thousand years. In other words a person can walk from anywhere in Africa to the early centers of civilization in the Mediterranean and Middle East, yet only limited cognitive progress has been made by the various groups of African people (as far as I have read). The hard earned knowledge created by earlier civilizations has diffused into Africa on a very limited basis. This issue predates European Colonialism by a very long time.
Maybe there are good explanations for this other than low IQ, mental capacity and associated time preference. I wish someone here would publish these explanations. Some that I have come across: wild animals--bogus, parasites--bogus, evil white man--bogus, evil moslems--bogus, plagues and famine--bogus. Is there a compelling cognitive aspect to the R-K issue?Replies: @Jack D
Crossing the Sahara was always difficult (though not impossible – there was always a salt trade because salt in the interior of Africa was very valuable). Also there was always contact along the coasts. Mostly from the Arab world. This is the reason that a lot of sub-Saharan Africa was Muslim.
Contact with Europe was very limited until the age of exploration, especially not into the interior which was not reached until well into the 19th century. The main obstacle was that white people would die due to tropical diseases.
But yes, Africans basically missed out on the 10,000 year explosion and it shows. Note though that Africa was not in the Stone Age. They did have iron making capability starting around 500 BC, unlike Amerindians. It’s not clear that they learned this from the north or whether they figured this out on their own but probably the former as their techniques were quite different than European ones. Oddly, they developed iron ahead of copper and copper was highly prized and used for jewelry, etc.
Also there are poor white children believe it or not. Why did they not do a study on them and see if there was not a difference in “brain capacity” or whatever they were measuring and the POC.
LOL,
Only black brains are negatively impacted by poverty and racism, and this explains the gap.
Poor Indian kids (dot), poor Asians, poor Hispanics, poor Arabian, poor Kurds, poor Armenians, poor berbers, poor Phillipino, poor Indonesians, and poor whites are immune apparently.
Every race has poor and screw-ups. Only one seeks to blame all others all the time.
The good folks of the Ivory Coast must spend the entirety of their days dodging bullets.
Nah, the good folks of the “Ivory Coast” are burdened by having ‘Ivory’, i.e. ‘whiteness’ in their name. This is, in and of itself, so toxic that the fact that they can survive at all is a testament to Black resilience in the face of crushing oppression. I F…. love Science!
Well that’s puzzling to me, because I thought it was common knowledge that Blacks are the race that is least likely to commit suicide. The highest suicide rates are to be found in Scandinavia, the Baltics, and Northeast Asia.Replies: @Travis, @Dani
You are correct, White Americans are four times as likely to commit suicide than Blacks. Caucasians have the highest antidepressant drug expenditures and utilization. ~25% of whites take some kind of psychiatric drug, almost triple the rate of Blacks.
Whites also have much higher rates of alcohol consumption and alcohol use disorder. 76% of white males regularly consume alcohol while only only 62% of Black males consume alcohol. Among American adults, 6.5% of Whites engage in heavy drinking verse just 2.9% of Blacks.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db374.htm
Would be interesting to study why Whites have twice the rate of heavy drinking compared to Blacks. Is it due to our higher levels of grey matter or due to our larger brains? Does our excess gray matter result in higher rates of anxiety and depression? Does the lower grey matter of Blacks help increase their happiness levels and lower their rates of depression and anxiety? Is this the root cause of the increased self-esteem of Blacks? Does too much grey matter lower happiness and increase anxiety?
despite the higher poverty levels of Blacks they continue to report higher levels of happiness, higher self-esteem while having less anxiety and depression compared to Whites. Why would Blacks want more gray matter if the result is less happiness, increased anxiety and higher rates of suicide and depression? Maybe the lower grey matter is an evolutionary benefit which reduces depression and anxiety, resulting in higher fertility rates . Whites, with their larger brains and excess gray matter are facing extinction while Blacks are growing their population and thriving in the 21st century. Our excess gray matter may be the root cause of the collapse of the white population.
But my point is that correlation--big heads and high intelligence--doesn't tell us a lot. The most you can say is that people with big heads relative to their body size are possibly more likely to be smarter than people with small heads. It still leaves open the question of how small-headed people can be smart, too, if cranial capacity is important to intelligence. Cardinal Richelieu, at least in his portraits, had a tiny head.Replies: @jb
You still don’t seem to understand what “correlation” means. Height and weight are correlated — on average tall people are heavier than short people — but the correlation coefficient isn’t that high, which means that there are lots of short people who are heavier than lots of tall people. Likewise, even though brain size and intelligence are correlated, the correlation is modest, so should not come as a huge shock if an individual with a small brain nevertheless turns out to be highly intelligent. It’s only if you compare large numbers of people with small and large brains that a difference will become apparent. (E.g., many blacks vs many whites).
(BTW, some birds — in particular crows — are amazingly intelligent given the size of their brains. The explanation seems to be that their neurons are smaller than mammalian neurons, and much more tightly packed. I wonder what you would end up with if you could fill a human sized skull with brains like that!)
So how did he do it?
He ran all questions by his ‘hidden figure’ Black slave Henry, of course. I thought everyone knew that.
Galbraith was 6’8″; Stigler appeared to be a tad taller
https://www.mcleanhospital.org/sites/default/files/styles/headshot/public/2022-01/HarnettHeadshot198Oct272021.jpg?itok=a9epB6lLReplies: @Element59, @kaganovitch
Has anyone else noticed the tendency of Bipoc academics to resemble day-time soap opera villains?
So they started with a preconceived conclusion that fit a specific political agenda and worked assiduously to ensure that their "findings" supported that conclusion. Sorry, guys, that's not how "research" works.
I've been shouting myself hoarse for a decade or more now demanding that some legitimate inquiry be conducted on what part significant inbreeding has on collective black dysfunction, but there is apparently no interest in peeling that onion.
Consider: The vast majority of black children in this country, particularly in the crowded cities, are born out of wedlock, following the typical negro courtship ritual of rutting willy-nilly and then saddling Uncle Sugar with the bill. Not only do few black children know who their biological fathers are, it is a safe bet that their biological mothers are not too terribly sure, either.
Given the negro male penchant for capping one another and engaging in other patently risky behaviors that manage to land roughly a quarter of them in prison during their most fruitful years, the relative paucity of available sires to brood sows coupled with their notorious fecundity means that in a given generation there are likely myriad half-siblings who are wholly unaware of their kinship. Within 15 years of birth, those randy revelers begin the process anew, very possibly mating with their own half-brothas and -sistas.
Time was, marriage between a man and a woman required a blood test to rule out any such unpleasantness, as it has been well known for millennia that incestuous relations are not conducive to producing viable offspring, human or otherwise. With that quaint old practice thoroughly cashiered in modern times, no one is minding the DNA store any longer. The result is the rise of a frighteningly huge underclass of patently useless wards of the state, existing under permanent custodial care, as the ghosts of Cloward and Piven squeal with delight.Replies: @additionalMike, @Elli
The required marriage license blood test of the past was for syphilis. It was not possible forty years ago to test for consanguinity.
This form of laundering means that the Press will have the figleaf that it needs in order to present your politics as irrefutable, unrebutted "news" and "science."Replies: @Jack D
Not just the news media but the gubmint. Yesterday I heard an NPR program about private equity. Some leftist academics did a “study” that said that private equity owned nursing homes were worse than others and next thing you know, Biden is mentioning in his State of the Union how we should ban private equity from owning nursing homes. Liz Warren in particular has some bug up her ass about private equity.
There is an unholy trinity of Leftist Media, Leftist Academics and Leftist Politicians who all
conspirecollaborate with each other. This same trinity was supposed to get gas ranges banned but the conspiracy got broken up before it could gain momentum. Leftist Academics do so bogus (government funded BTW) “study” and then the study gets publicized by the Leftist Press and then Leftist Politicians implement legislation based upon the “science”. Follow the science, people!At no point did the CBS piece attempt to support its proposition that the government didn't begin the process of banning gas stoves. It just went from the montage of "Fox News is populated by liars and you're low status if you watch them" to "smart, science-y people telling you that gas is killing you and the Earth," then to the magic solution (induction ranges) with no discussion of their downsides (high cost, many people would need to replace all of their cookware, electrical grid gets maxed already in certain places and at certain times), then to a typewritten statement by people who make money from selling gas (and probably cigarettes to children!). This is the nature of so much "news" now - one side is low status and lying ("lying" now means disagreeing with the high status view), the other side is futuristic science and adopting it has no downsides, and the low status side is probably just a front for evil, moneyed interests.Replies: @Jack D
L-R, Stigler, Friedman, Galbraith:
https://external-preview.redd.it/P5hGvfcAPICWIdw-pUQ3HRBxRAd3E2lM8NJ7XMR0kmw.jpg?auto=webp&v=enabled&s=990e59cc4c7335aca501453baf644e8d25ec7dffReplies: @Charlotte Allen, @Unladen Swallow
More of Stigler’s legendary wit, I read his biography and he was quite funny. I think Friedman was 5’3″ or 5’4″ and Galbraith was 6’7″, so it is easy to get the joke if you know that.
I read von Neumann was 5’9″, which would put him above average even today ( 5’8″ is the mean now ) for American males born in the early 20th century, probably a bit more, same thing for Einstein as an American, although he was probably below average for a German.
Judging by this photo with 5’10” J.Robert Oppenheimer, I think Von Neumann is a weak 5’9” but a strong 5’8”.
As an aside I read somewhere that Oppenheimer’s weight was 130 lbs. Very light for 5’10”.
There is an unholy trinity of Leftist Media, Leftist Academics and Leftist Politicians who all
conspirecollaborate with each other. This same trinity was supposed to get gas ranges banned but the conspiracy got broken up before it could gain momentum. Leftist Academics do so bogus (government funded BTW) "study" and then the study gets publicized by the Leftist Press and then Leftist Politicians implement legislation based upon the "science". Follow the science, people!Replies: @Charlotte Allen, @Recently Based, @Alec Leamas (working from home), @Art DecoWhy are private equity-owned nursing homes a good idea? I wouldn’t want to live in a nursing home where the main objective was to cut costs to the bone and then dump. The financialization of healthcare is one of the creepiest aspects of contemporary life.
If a privately-owned, for-profit nursing home gets a reputation for bad service, it will lose patients, someone makes less money, and it could close and he will lose a lot more. Has that ever happened to a government-run organization? Whose money is at stake at a non-profit? Who gives a crap what they do?
That is pretty much the summation of HBD.Replies: @Rich, @Intelligent Dasein
Yes, and this is why HBD is ridiculous.
The devotees of human biodiversity will triumphantly display their charts of non-overlapping bell curves of black and white IQ scores and claim that this validates everything they’ve been saying, seemingly unwilling to understand that the mere data is compatible with any number of explanations, and that the superstructure of evolutionary psychology that they’ve adduced to describe it all is simply their own fancy and, as a real scientific hypothesis, is already ruled out on other grounds.
In the mind of an HBDer, the following ideas seem self-evidently true. If a black person commits a beastly crime, it is characteristic of the whole race. His race predisposes him to do such things; it is a “black crime.” Intelligence is highly inheritable, unless you’re an intelligent black person, in which case your descendants are doomed to suffer from “mean reversion” and will not inherit your high IQ. All the geniuses produced by the white race, meanwhile, are characteristic of that race; it is “white genius,” which somehow imparts a sacramental character indelebilis to everyone born of European ancestry. White violent criminals are mostly passed over in silence, unless they are sexy psychopaths and serial killers, in which case their only real fault is “hypermasculinity”—a genetic cross they must bear so that the rest of us can benefit from their genes for language and abstraction in gentler, non-autistic combinations.
That anyone would believe such patently self-serving nonsense is puzzling, but Sailer has made an entire career out of this, and his devoted fanbase returns here, day after day, to hear the same bromides and to make the same complaints that have all already been said a thousand times over. Clearly, they are unhappy with the status quo and want to change something, but what? Their principal antagonist seems to be “The Narrative,” i.e. a deeply entrenched cultural and institutional belief that all races are equal in every respect and would behave as such were it not for the existence of “racism.” The Narrative is the unacceptable boogeyman they propose to combat with the righteous sword of HBD.
Exactly what specific policies they hope to see changed in the wake of their battle is unclear, for every cultural artefact supposedly spawned by The Narrative is equally compatible with their own version of the story, as I and others have pointed out countless times. Let’s assume for argument’s sake that HBD is 100% true, and let’s imagine that the whole world will be converted to it tomorrow morning. It does not follow from this that progressives need alter their policies one wit. Affirmative Action, disparate impact, the mollycoddling of black criminals, and the whole suite of Civil Rights Era legislation could be argued in favor of precisely because blacks are genetically inferior and need a leg up. It is the inverse of the Vonnegut story; we can call it “Harrison DeBergeron.”
HBDers don’t have a plan for what to do, they just want to see The Narrative destroyed by whatever means possible. Ever quick to flourish their bell curves, they demand that all this talk of equality cease in the presence of their almighty data. This request we should grant them wholeheartedly. There is no equality. For whatever reason, we live in a time and place where blacks seem to commit more than their fair share of crimes and have less than their fair share of successes. There is no reason why this fact needs to be elevated into a political issue. Let the busybodies of both sides be silent.
Progressives need to stop trying to close the gap with failed and unlawful social policies, and Alt-Righters need to stop trying to explain the gap with pseudoscience. On the one hand, policies such as Affirmative Action and disparate impact legislation are complete violations of the natural law and need to be rescinded forthwith; on the other hand, racialist reasoning which, if carried to its logical extreme, would hold that blacks aren’t really responsible for the crimes they commit due to their racial handicap, also needs to be struck away. If race is the ultimate arbiter in human affairs, then nobody is responsible for anything. If people are responsible for what they do, notwithstanding the accidents of birth and circumstance, then race is just one more inscrutable factor in the great tapestry of existence, which no man can claim to see with perfect clarity. We will see it at the Last Judgment, and not before.
We already have the juridical framework to set the matter aright: Get rid of all the legal and quasi-legal racial spoils systems (they are unconstitutional anyway) and hold everyone equally accountable before the law. If that isn’t good enough for you then nothing ever will be, for that is the best that mortals can do.
Pretty damn good.
Wasn’t Friedman 5′ even?
Other studies show that if you take a nursing home that is run by say an Indian or Hasidic “entrepreneur” and sell it to a private equity co. with professional management, the quality of the care goes up. The private equity co. also has economies of scale – they can get bulk deals on adult diapers and such and they can centralize functions so that one bookkeeper might suffice for 10 nursing homes instead of having 1 for each home.
The other answer is that we have a market system and don’t designate certain types of business to be owned by certain sorts of private entities. If you want to nationalized health care, fine (usually gov. owned hospitals are hell holes). But if they are going to be owned privately then there should be a level playing field for any sort of private owner. Regulate minimum standards, amounts charged, whatever but why pick and choose among different types of owners? The government sucks at this.
I'm not talking about regulation, much less nationalization. I'm talking about the realities of private-equity "investment." The whole aim of private equity is to get in and get out, while making money for the partners, especially the general partner. It doesn't matter what the entity acquired is. Cost-cutting is the name of the game, and if the private-equity outfit can't find a buyer for the entity once it's done its number, the next step is liquidation--and that's a fairly frequent step. But private equity is only one aspect of the growing financialization of health care, especially when there's a trough of easy government money (Medicare, Medicaid) for the "private owners" to feed from, coupled with a population (frail old folks with declining cognition) that no one really gives two damns about. It's a creepy trend. The hospice industry is now mostly a for-profit racket, for example, where the business plan is to figure out whether to keep the residents alive to the max so as to suck up the Medicare/Medicaid or whether to get them down the greasy slide to the great beyond as "efficiently" as possible.Replies: @Anonymous, @Art Deco
This is the most progressive city in Texas?
Chaotic scene erupts outside Texas grocery store after someone posts about ‘free food’ being distributed amid power outages
Isn’t “Paradise Afshar” a great name, though?
Paradise Afshar = Had airfare pass.
Obviously one of the major defects of our society is the total unwillingness to hold blacks to any level of accountability - it encourages cultural habits that are hugely destructive to blacks themselves and inflicts collateral damage on the nation at large.
I am not sure if people like Bill Maher will ever get redpilled enough to comment on that phenomenon, but that's basically what it would take - people with national presence who are politically left of center to openly discuss black failures and what they owe to the rest of society before they have the standing to demand anything.Replies: @J.Ross
Agree, and what leftism has collapsed to is the worst sort of tolerance, the tolerance of the addict who tolerates others in the hope that his vice will be tolerated by them.
> An independent-samples t test demonstrated that racial groups differed in intracranial volume (t=19.44, df=8235, p<0.001).
IIRC, Stephen J. Gould spent a not insignificant portion of The Mismeasure of Man claiming that Morton's measure of cranium volume, finding that black brain volume was lower than white, was flawed and driven by ideology.
I think the Unz miracle software will turn text that looks like a URL into a hyperlink.
Test:
https://www.unz.com/author/steve-sailer/
If you want your link to have different text, you need to do the [a title=”URL” href=”URL”>text</a], but with less than sign and greater than sign instead of [ and ].
There have also been some famously short economists like Milton Friedman and Robert Reich.
But that just makes his grift worse because he knows the "economics" he peddles is a joke.
I don't mean to go off on Reich but I guess I hate to see him in the same sentence as Friedman.Replies: @Prester John, @Unladen Swallow
There is an unholy trinity of Leftist Media, Leftist Academics and Leftist Politicians who all
conspirecollaborate with each other. This same trinity was supposed to get gas ranges banned but the conspiracy got broken up before it could gain momentum. Leftist Academics do so bogus (government funded BTW) "study" and then the study gets publicized by the Leftist Press and then Leftist Politicians implement legislation based upon the "science". Follow the science, people!Replies: @Charlotte Allen, @Recently Based, @Alec Leamas (working from home), @Art DecoI’m sure it’s old news to everybody here, but I have found the concept of The Cathedral to be very helpful in describing this.
I didn’t write the theory, argue with Steve or Jared Taylor.
Yup. Cheap homes with real backyards, (I have almost an acre, beats Queens) 350 days of sunshine, and very little snow.
They should accentuate the positive. For instance, Ta-Nehisi Coates isn’t that smart, but he’s pretty smart compared to other blacks.
The devotees of human biodiversity will triumphantly display their charts of non-overlapping bell curves of black and white IQ scores and claim that this validates everything they've been saying, seemingly unwilling to understand that the mere data is compatible with any number of explanations, and that the superstructure of evolutionary psychology that they've adduced to describe it all is simply their own fancy and, as a real scientific hypothesis, is already ruled out on other grounds.
In the mind of an HBDer, the following ideas seem self-evidently true. If a black person commits a beastly crime, it is characteristic of the whole race. His race predisposes him to do such things; it is a "black crime." Intelligence is highly inheritable, unless you're an intelligent black person, in which case your descendants are doomed to suffer from "mean reversion" and will not inherit your high IQ. All the geniuses produced by the white race, meanwhile, are characteristic of that race; it is "white genius," which somehow imparts a sacramental character indelebilis to everyone born of European ancestry. White violent criminals are mostly passed over in silence, unless they are sexy psychopaths and serial killers, in which case their only real fault is "hypermasculinity"---a genetic cross they must bear so that the rest of us can benefit from their genes for language and abstraction in gentler, non-autistic combinations.
That anyone would believe such patently self-serving nonsense is puzzling, but Sailer has made an entire career out of this, and his devoted fanbase returns here, day after day, to hear the same bromides and to make the same complaints that have all already been said a thousand times over. Clearly, they are unhappy with the status quo and want to change something, but what? Their principal antagonist seems to be "The Narrative," i.e. a deeply entrenched cultural and institutional belief that all races are equal in every respect and would behave as such were it not for the existence of "racism." The Narrative is the unacceptable boogeyman they propose to combat with the righteous sword of HBD.
Exactly what specific policies they hope to see changed in the wake of their battle is unclear, for every cultural artefact supposedly spawned by The Narrative is equally compatible with their own version of the story, as I and others have pointed out countless times. Let's assume for argument's sake that HBD is 100% true, and let's imagine that the whole world will be converted to it tomorrow morning. It does not follow from this that progressives need alter their policies one wit. Affirmative Action, disparate impact, the mollycoddling of black criminals, and the whole suite of Civil Rights Era legislation could be argued in favor of precisely because blacks are genetically inferior and need a leg up. It is the inverse of the Vonnegut story; we can call it "Harrison DeBergeron."
HBDers don't have a plan for what to do, they just want to see The Narrative destroyed by whatever means possible. Ever quick to flourish their bell curves, they demand that all this talk of equality cease in the presence of their almighty data. This request we should grant them wholeheartedly. There is no equality. For whatever reason, we live in a time and place where blacks seem to commit more than their fair share of crimes and have less than their fair share of successes. There is no reason why this fact needs to be elevated into a political issue. Let the busybodies of both sides be silent.
Progressives need to stop trying to close the gap with failed and unlawful social policies, and Alt-Righters need to stop trying to explain the gap with pseudoscience. On the one hand, policies such as Affirmative Action and disparate impact legislation are complete violations of the natural law and need to be rescinded forthwith; on the other hand, racialist reasoning which, if carried to its logical extreme, would hold that blacks aren't really responsible for the crimes they commit due to their racial handicap, also needs to be struck away. If race is the ultimate arbiter in human affairs, then nobody is responsible for anything. If people are responsible for what they do, notwithstanding the accidents of birth and circumstance, then race is just one more inscrutable factor in the great tapestry of existence, which no man can claim to see with perfect clarity. We will see it at the Last Judgment, and not before.
We already have the juridical framework to set the matter aright: Get rid of all the legal and quasi-legal racial spoils systems (they are unconstitutional anyway) and hold everyone equally accountable before the law. If that isn't good enough for you then nothing ever will be, for that is the best that mortals can do.Replies: @Truth, @gail
I.D. That was….
Pretty damn good.
In ma case, brain function be different from da cracka heads cuz ma mama done slap me upside da head every time I done gib her lip.Replies: @Post-Postmodernist
To paraphrase Kevin Michael Grace,
‘Racism’ is to Generation Woke what ‘self-abuse’ was to the Victorians.
Tangentially…
A recent article from same publication (NZ Herald) the archived piece linked above is from:
Truth behind concerning new sex trend that can cause serious harm
Even within the realm of the sexual, every age has its quirks, excesses and indignities. Who is to say that —on balance[cbc.ca][1]– the Victorians’ were any worse than ours?
[1] Don’t be put-off by the click-baity title, gratuitous photo, and cram of punny double-entendres that characterize the style of the article. They are unfortunate but the article’s substance, largely serious and sensible, is better summed-up in its subtitle:
“There is no one true science of the female orgasm”
Many would no doubt hasten to add, And it is at least as much of an art as a science. (As if even the latter is settled…)
I suppose one reason that equally poor Hispanics don't commit crimes as frequently as you'd predict if you believe that poverty causes crime is that Hispanics tend to retain intact families much more often, and they have broader familial support systems. In other words, Hispanics are more likely to receive beatings from their own fathers rather than a series of strange men who happen to be having sex with their mothers at any given time.
I don't know how you solve this but it seems to me that the incidence of abuse by stepfathers/mothers' boyfriends has probably increased in correlation with the disintegration of intact families across all demographics, with blacks experiencing this first and worst. Obviously judging by the black experience, antipoverty programs coupled with a culturally broad emphasis on women's fulfillment would only serve to exacerbate these problems. Women's liberation from all social and family bonds is presumed to be an unalloyed good in modern U.S. political and legal thinking, and the welfare state seems to be back with a vengeance following a respite in the 1990s. So I imagine that addressing the real causes of these problems is near impossible.Replies: @Jamsportle
IIRC, half of the Mexican kids in the US are born to unmarried women, but sometimes that’s for stupid reasons like “We couldn’t afford a big expensive wedding to impress our families, so we didn’t bother”. The sperm donor is still there, being a father, albeit a dumb one. Also the mother’s brothers will often take an active role as substitute fathers. Less than ideal, but much better than Black-style abandonment.
-Discard
In any event, the practicing of the "form" of married family life is probably the key here insofar as the child's biological father in the home necessarily excludes the presence of the mother's boyfriend/stepfather (except for the minuscule number of perverts practicing polyamory).
Judging by this photo with 5’10” J.Robert Oppenheimer, I think Von Neumann is a weak 5’9” but a strong 5’8”.
As an aside I read somewhere that Oppenheimer’s weight was 130 lbs. Very light for 5’10”.
Reich is a literal midget. But I wouldn’t call him a real economist. He’s a lawyer by education and he writes hack pro-Democrat polemics for a living. He says things like inflation is just caused by corporations raising prices because they have decided to start “price gouging.” (He doesn’t explain why they don’t price gouge all the time if they can raise prices at will). He is smart.
But that just makes his grift worse because he knows the “economics” he peddles is a joke.
I don’t mean to go off on Reich but I guess I hate to see him in the same sentence as Friedman.
Oh come on! Let’s compare a private equity-run nursing home to a nursing home run by an ethnic sleazebag!
I’m not talking about regulation, much less nationalization. I’m talking about the realities of private-equity “investment.” The whole aim of private equity is to get in and get out, while making money for the partners, especially the general partner. It doesn’t matter what the entity acquired is. Cost-cutting is the name of the game, and if the private-equity outfit can’t find a buyer for the entity once it’s done its number, the next step is liquidation–and that’s a fairly frequent step. But private equity is only one aspect of the growing financialization of health care, especially when there’s a trough of easy government money (Medicare, Medicaid) for the “private owners” to feed from, coupled with a population (frail old folks with declining cognition) that no one really gives two damns about. It’s a creepy trend. The hospice industry is now mostly a for-profit racket, for example, where the business plan is to figure out whether to keep the residents alive to the max so as to suck up the Medicare/Medicaid or whether to get them down the greasy slide to the great beyond as “efficiently” as possible.
==
Private equity is the last stop on the train to bankruptcy court. They're making bets on unhealthy enterprises.
If the correlation coefficient is “modest,” then the correlation doesn’t mean all that much. I’m not talking about whether white people are generally more intelligent than black people. I’m talking about whether it’s meaningful to correlate head size (absolute or relative) to intelligence.
Now I feel a little bit sorry for Bill.
But instead we will simply rely on studies from the Bix Nood Institute.Replies: @Anon
It’s literally not racism when blacks do it.
The oldest daughter married an Arab but at least he’s rich. Wonder where this daughter got her black boyfriend from? Don’t hear much about Gate’s son, hopefully he isn’t gay or something.
There is an unholy trinity of Leftist Media, Leftist Academics and Leftist Politicians who all
conspirecollaborate with each other. This same trinity was supposed to get gas ranges banned but the conspiracy got broken up before it could gain momentum. Leftist Academics do so bogus (government funded BTW) "study" and then the study gets publicized by the Leftist Press and then Leftist Politicians implement legislation based upon the "science". Follow the science, people!Replies: @Charlotte Allen, @Recently Based, @Alec Leamas (working from home), @Art DecoYesterday morning’s CBS News Sunday Morning did a piece on the gas stoves thing. It started with a montage, mostly of soundbites of Fox News shows discussing gas stoves over which the narrator says (paraphrasing) “you’ve heard a lot of false noise lately in the culture wars about the government banning gas stoves.” Then it cuts to a file photo of Trumka Jr. as the Commissioner of the Consumer Products Safety Commission being quoted as saying “all options are on the table” (omitting his tweet about gas stoves). Then the bulk of the piece is an interview with the authors of the “study” showing gas stoves are bad for kids with asthma and for global warming, spliced with the narrator/author “interviewing” an old Puerto Rican woman in the Bronx who had a gas stove in her tenement replaced with an induction range by some charitable concern. Then the guy interviews a chef turned paid advocate for induction stoves who is cooking on her induction stovetop (there is no mention of the fact that induction stoves are very expensive and only work with cookware made of ferrous materials). Takeaway is that gas stoves are very, very bad, and that induction stoves are very, very good. The piece ends with a graphic of a canned statement identified as being from the gas industry in response.
At no point did the CBS piece attempt to support its proposition that the government didn’t begin the process of banning gas stoves. It just went from the montage of “Fox News is populated by liars and you’re low status if you watch them” to “smart, science-y people telling you that gas is killing you and the Earth,” then to the magic solution (induction ranges) with no discussion of their downsides (high cost, many people would need to replace all of their cookware, electrical grid gets maxed already in certain places and at certain times), then to a typewritten statement by people who make money from selling gas (and probably cigarettes to children!). This is the nature of so much “news” now – one side is low status and lying (“lying” now means disagreeing with the high status view), the other side is futuristic science and adopting it has no downsides, and the low status side is probably just a front for evil, moneyed interests.
But that just makes his grift worse because he knows the "economics" he peddles is a joke.
I don't mean to go off on Reich but I guess I hate to see him in the same sentence as Friedman.Replies: @Prester John, @Unladen Swallow
What? Didn’t you know that lawyers know EVERYTHING?
-DiscardReplies: @Alec Leamas (working from home)
True, but 25% of white children are born to single mothers – the difference is important but this is becoming a norm across demographics. If Mexicans are at 50% they could be pulling down the overall Hispanic numbers – I wonder what the order of “most respectable, intact family rate” among Hispanic subgroups would be?
In any event, the practicing of the “form” of married family life is probably the key here insofar as the child’s biological father in the home necessarily excludes the presence of the mother’s boyfriend/stepfather (except for the minuscule number of perverts practicing polyamory).
It’s the Invisible Hand!
If a privately-owned, for-profit nursing home gets a reputation for bad service, it will lose patients, someone makes less money, and it could close and he will lose a lot more. Has that ever happened to a government-run organization? Whose money is at stake at a non-profit? Who gives a crap what they do?
This is a lot of manure spreading, fertilizing the ground as it were in anticipation of America’s version of The Final Solution: Reparations.
Test:
https://www.unz.com/author/steve-sailer/If you want your link to have different text, you need to do the [a href="URL">text</a], but with less than sign and greater than sign instead of [ and ].Replies: @Ralph L
The software screwed that up and I didn’t notice:
[a title=””URL”]your” href=”URL”]your choice of text[/a], but with less than sign and greater than sign instead of [ and ] is the correct way to make a hyperlink. Some sites don’t require the “s.
The average American black is 15-20% Northern European genetically. It is interesting though how mullato blacks have worse mental health than pure(er) blacks, and thus they may be smarter but not overall better off.
Then there's the factor that per Ed Dutton, people who elope outside their race are more narcissistic and psychopathic as it indicates extreme lack of in group loyalty, particularly if it's with blacks (as opposed to East Asians or the more whiteish of Hispanics). We also know that white women who elope with blacks tend to self-report a lot of disagreeable traits.Replies: @Mike Tre, @Charlesz Martel, @Truth, @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco
hen there’s the factor that per Ed Dutton, people who elope outside their race are more narcissistic and psychopathic as it indicates extreme lack of in group loyalty, particularly if it’s with blacks (as opposed to East Asians or the more whiteish of Hispanics).
LOL!
Good save. You know half the married Unzistas are with Pefaces.
Pure classic.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-brain-size-matter1/
You also have the issue that only part of your brain involves higher functions that we call intelligence so you could have a large brain but have most of it devoted to other stuff. Dolphins have very large brains but probably a lot of it is devoted to processing the signals from their sonar system. This gives them capabilities that humans don't have (except that human intelligence allows us to build sonar machines) but are not what we would call "intelligence".
There are a lot of traits that are valid for groups but tell you nothing about individuals. As a group, E. Africans can run long distances faster than white people, so the top finishers in Olympic marathons tend to be E. African. But any individual E. African could be slower (or faster) than a typical E. African. People who are notable in any field (such as Madison) tend to be outliers - Madison's genius tells you nothing about the average intelligence of 5'4" individuals. Also note that average height was lower in the past due to difference in nutrition so in his age he wasn't particularly short.Replies: @jb, @Charlotte Allen, @Anonymous
Is the East African advantage in distance running due to genetics or altitude?
White brains vs black brains? Ask any zombie
The devotees of human biodiversity will triumphantly display their charts of non-overlapping bell curves of black and white IQ scores and claim that this validates everything they've been saying, seemingly unwilling to understand that the mere data is compatible with any number of explanations, and that the superstructure of evolutionary psychology that they've adduced to describe it all is simply their own fancy and, as a real scientific hypothesis, is already ruled out on other grounds.
In the mind of an HBDer, the following ideas seem self-evidently true. If a black person commits a beastly crime, it is characteristic of the whole race. His race predisposes him to do such things; it is a "black crime." Intelligence is highly inheritable, unless you're an intelligent black person, in which case your descendants are doomed to suffer from "mean reversion" and will not inherit your high IQ. All the geniuses produced by the white race, meanwhile, are characteristic of that race; it is "white genius," which somehow imparts a sacramental character indelebilis to everyone born of European ancestry. White violent criminals are mostly passed over in silence, unless they are sexy psychopaths and serial killers, in which case their only real fault is "hypermasculinity"---a genetic cross they must bear so that the rest of us can benefit from their genes for language and abstraction in gentler, non-autistic combinations.
That anyone would believe such patently self-serving nonsense is puzzling, but Sailer has made an entire career out of this, and his devoted fanbase returns here, day after day, to hear the same bromides and to make the same complaints that have all already been said a thousand times over. Clearly, they are unhappy with the status quo and want to change something, but what? Their principal antagonist seems to be "The Narrative," i.e. a deeply entrenched cultural and institutional belief that all races are equal in every respect and would behave as such were it not for the existence of "racism." The Narrative is the unacceptable boogeyman they propose to combat with the righteous sword of HBD.
Exactly what specific policies they hope to see changed in the wake of their battle is unclear, for every cultural artefact supposedly spawned by The Narrative is equally compatible with their own version of the story, as I and others have pointed out countless times. Let's assume for argument's sake that HBD is 100% true, and let's imagine that the whole world will be converted to it tomorrow morning. It does not follow from this that progressives need alter their policies one wit. Affirmative Action, disparate impact, the mollycoddling of black criminals, and the whole suite of Civil Rights Era legislation could be argued in favor of precisely because blacks are genetically inferior and need a leg up. It is the inverse of the Vonnegut story; we can call it "Harrison DeBergeron."
HBDers don't have a plan for what to do, they just want to see The Narrative destroyed by whatever means possible. Ever quick to flourish their bell curves, they demand that all this talk of equality cease in the presence of their almighty data. This request we should grant them wholeheartedly. There is no equality. For whatever reason, we live in a time and place where blacks seem to commit more than their fair share of crimes and have less than their fair share of successes. There is no reason why this fact needs to be elevated into a political issue. Let the busybodies of both sides be silent.
Progressives need to stop trying to close the gap with failed and unlawful social policies, and Alt-Righters need to stop trying to explain the gap with pseudoscience. On the one hand, policies such as Affirmative Action and disparate impact legislation are complete violations of the natural law and need to be rescinded forthwith; on the other hand, racialist reasoning which, if carried to its logical extreme, would hold that blacks aren't really responsible for the crimes they commit due to their racial handicap, also needs to be struck away. If race is the ultimate arbiter in human affairs, then nobody is responsible for anything. If people are responsible for what they do, notwithstanding the accidents of birth and circumstance, then race is just one more inscrutable factor in the great tapestry of existence, which no man can claim to see with perfect clarity. We will see it at the Last Judgment, and not before.
We already have the juridical framework to set the matter aright: Get rid of all the legal and quasi-legal racial spoils systems (they are unconstitutional anyway) and hold everyone equally accountable before the law. If that isn't good enough for you then nothing ever will be, for that is the best that mortals can do.Replies: @Truth, @gail
A plan?
A person believing human population groups are diverse biologically, including cognitively diverse, should have “a plan”? It’s not enough that decades upon decades of research and published scholarship on human evolution has established that?
Now, in order for people to believe in HBD at all, they must_have_a_plan?
Too much craziness in your screed.
"Groups of people are different". Gee, well, that's not exactly a novel or brilliant insight, is it?
It was something considered as a pretty much obvious thing, for thousands of years.
So, I fail to see what's so great or new about HBD, except for the obsession with IQ tests and the bogus Darwinian or psycho-evo explanationa for things that probably have other, better explanations.
Indeed. Some real desperation and barrel-scraping going on here, which for me at least has the opposite effect to the one intended by CNN.
The average American black is 15-20% Northern European genetically. It is interesting though how mullato blacks have worse mental health than pure(er) blacks, and thus they may be smarter but not overall better off.
Then there's the factor that per Ed Dutton, people who elope outside their race are more narcissistic and psychopathic as it indicates extreme lack of in group loyalty, particularly if it's with blacks (as opposed to East Asians or the more whiteish of Hispanics). We also know that white women who elope with blacks tend to self-report a lot of disagreeable traits.Replies: @Mike Tre, @Charlesz Martel, @Truth, @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco
Additional gray matter appear to be detrimental to mental health. Whites have more gray matter and higher rates of depression and anxiety. Thus mulattos have more mental health issues than Blacks due to their excess gray matter. To improve The mental health of whites we need to decrease the gray matter with psychotropic drugs and alcohol.
Does he look that short in the photo? I thought Stigler was 6’5″ and Galbraith 6’7″, so maybe.
At no point did the CBS piece attempt to support its proposition that the government didn't begin the process of banning gas stoves. It just went from the montage of "Fox News is populated by liars and you're low status if you watch them" to "smart, science-y people telling you that gas is killing you and the Earth," then to the magic solution (induction ranges) with no discussion of their downsides (high cost, many people would need to replace all of their cookware, electrical grid gets maxed already in certain places and at certain times), then to a typewritten statement by people who make money from selling gas (and probably cigarettes to children!). This is the nature of so much "news" now - one side is low status and lying ("lying" now means disagreeing with the high status view), the other side is futuristic science and adopting it has no downsides, and the low status side is probably just a front for evil, moneyed interests.Replies: @Jack D
The funny thing is that I have an induction cooktop and I love that thing. You couldn’t pay me to switch to gas. I can’t tell you how wicked fast that thing boils water or how you can turn it down to next to nothing and the flame doesn’t blow out. But people should be able to make up their own stupid minds.
I switched my bulbs over to compact fluorescent before LEDs were available and was fine with them, but some people hated those things with a white hot passion (there are probably a few holdouts against LEDs too but they seem to be less objectionable). Far be it from me to tell you what kind of light bulb or stove you should have. I don’t pay your electric bill. I don’t have to breath the air in your kitchen. I don’t have to stand around and wait forever while you try to boil a pot of water for spaghetti. If you have some stupid attachment to old technology, it’s all yours, man.
If induction stoves are pricey it’s some sort of conspiracy by the American appliance manufacturers because a Chinese made induction burner costs maybe $30 – it’s just a coil of wire and some cheap electronics. For a stove you need 4 or 5 of these. In fact you can buy such a cooktop on ebay for $165:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/144926746614
I OTOH paid $1K for an induction top 10 years ago because it was a major brand. OTOH it’s been 10 years and it still works so it’s cost me $100/yr so far (and counting).
From that you would subtract the cost of the gas or electric burners, which can’t be that much less.
This doesn’t include the oven. There’s no such thing as an induction oven – the oven part is just a regular electric oven, no difference in cost.
The ferrous metals thing is a canard. A $20 Lodge cast iron skillet works great and I could take you to Ikea and get a whole set of induction ready pans for $100 that is probably nicer than what you already own (induction is more common in Europe so most of the Ikea stuff is induction ready.) If you own really nice stuff like All-Clad, it’s induction ready already.
I was toying with the idea of getting a standalone induction unit for making longer summering stocks like veal and beef stock so that I could leave the house safely while they simmer since there is no danger of fire.Replies: @Jack D
This type of research truly bedevils Mr. Sailer. He has to resort to staccato grievance commentary, followed by an admission, although tepid, that environmental factors are indeed a powerful force in human brain development.
The problem for blacks in America is that they get a double hit. If your parents are poor, it's probably because they are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. As poor stupid people, they are not going to provide you with the greatest home environment AND they are also going to bequeath to you their stupid genes (if nothing else) t00. So you are going to get it coming and going.Replies: @Chuck
I know, right? I’ve lost track of how many of these ridiculous, anti-White, BS, fake-science studies have come out over just the past several months alone. What’s especially disgusting is they’re doing nothing to hide the fact for them it’s not at all about actual, scientific, true-to-life studies, otherwise they would be sure to include all of the other colors in our multicultural rainbow s*** society.
Nope, nothin’ doin’! As always, these “studies” focus only on two of the races existing in the U.S.
Fancy that!
Well that’s puzzling to me, because I thought it was common knowledge that Blacks are the race that is least likely to commit suicide. The highest suicide rates are to be found in Scandinavia, the Baltics, and Northeast Asia.Replies: @Travis, @Dani
They basically did NO study and just put all of the usual, anti-White garbage in this waste of time for anyone with a functioning brain. Everybody knows that negroes don’t commit suicide. They are pushing the envelope that much further and it’s beyond embarrassing and shameless.
I have All-Clad but also lots of copper cookware which wouldn’t work on an induction range.
I was toying with the idea of getting a standalone induction unit for making longer summering stocks like veal and beef stock so that I could leave the house safely while they simmer since there is no danger of fire.
I was toying with the idea of getting a standalone induction unit for making longer summering stocks like veal and beef stock so that I could leave the house safely while they simmer since there is no danger of fire.Replies: @Jack D
Yes, you’re right copper is out. I’d bet that less than 1% of the cookware in America is copper. I used to have some copper stuff but I switched to All Clad years before I even got an induction stove. I don’t miss polishing copper pots.
I’d encourage you to get a portable induction just to try out the technology. Make sure you get one that has a lot of fine increments in the heat level. If you want to simmer stock and the induction has 25 degree steps then 200 is going to be below a simmer and 225 is going to be a raging boil with nothing in between. The full size stoves are pretty good about this but some of the $30 Chinese portables cheap out on the number of steps. Duxtop is a good brand and they have models to fit every budget. Chances are some of your existing cookware will work. If a magnet will stick to it, then it will usually work. Believe it or not, not all stainless steel is magnetic.
You can also use them to cook in your backyard (if you can run an extension cord). In the summer I sometimes move the cooking outside so as not to steam up the kitchen. Then you really don’t have to worry about burning down the house.
The portables top out at 1800W ( the max capacity of a 120V outlet) but the stovetop burners go up to 3000W and beyond because they run on a 50A, 240V line. Even an 1800W burner is going to boil water faster than your gas stove but the cooktops are faster still.
No one (certainly not Steve) ever said that environment was not a factor. I’d say that it accounts for maybe half the explanation in rough terms. The real crackpots are the Leftists who believe that environment explains 100% of the Gap and that there is zero genetic component. They belong with Lysenko and yet they are the ones who supposedly believe in Science.
The problem for blacks in America is that they get a double hit. If your parents are poor, it’s probably because they are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. As poor stupid people, they are not going to provide you with the greatest home environment AND they are also going to bequeath to you their stupid genes (if nothing else) t00. So you are going to get it coming and going.
I'm not talking about regulation, much less nationalization. I'm talking about the realities of private-equity "investment." The whole aim of private equity is to get in and get out, while making money for the partners, especially the general partner. It doesn't matter what the entity acquired is. Cost-cutting is the name of the game, and if the private-equity outfit can't find a buyer for the entity once it's done its number, the next step is liquidation--and that's a fairly frequent step. But private equity is only one aspect of the growing financialization of health care, especially when there's a trough of easy government money (Medicare, Medicaid) for the "private owners" to feed from, coupled with a population (frail old folks with declining cognition) that no one really gives two damns about. It's a creepy trend. The hospice industry is now mostly a for-profit racket, for example, where the business plan is to figure out whether to keep the residents alive to the max so as to suck up the Medicare/Medicaid or whether to get them down the greasy slide to the great beyond as "efficiently" as possible.Replies: @Anonymous, @Art Deco
It’s really a kind of farming, but with oldsters as the livestock.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/when-private-equity-takes-over-a-nursing-home
It’s part of the enormous–and relatively recent–decline of private medical charity and the willingness of people to give their lives to it–no more nursing nuns, for example. Here is an example of private equity making a nursing home more “efficient”:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/when-private-equity-takes-over-a-nursing-home
Whites also have much higher rates of alcohol consumption and alcohol use disorder. 76% of white males regularly consume alcohol while only only 62% of Black males consume alcohol. Among American adults, 6.5% of Whites engage in heavy drinking verse just 2.9% of Blacks.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db374.htm
Would be interesting to study why Whites have twice the rate of heavy drinking compared to Blacks. Is it due to our higher levels of grey matter or due to our larger brains? Does our excess gray matter result in higher rates of anxiety and depression? Does the lower grey matter of Blacks help increase their happiness levels and lower their rates of depression and anxiety? Is this the root cause of the increased self-esteem of Blacks? Does too much grey matter lower happiness and increase anxiety?
despite the higher poverty levels of Blacks they continue to report higher levels of happiness, higher self-esteem while having less anxiety and depression compared to Whites. Why would Blacks want more gray matter if the result is less happiness, increased anxiety and higher rates of suicide and depression? Maybe the lower grey matter is an evolutionary benefit which reduces depression and anxiety, resulting in higher fertility rates . Whites, with their larger brains and excess gray matter are facing extinction while Blacks are growing their population and thriving in the 21st century. Our excess gray matter may be the root cause of the collapse of the white population.Replies: @Hapalong Cassidy
I always thought the simple explanation for the differing suicide rates was that suicidal ideation requires a higher baseline IQ to take hold. To look at ones own life situation and be driven to despair requires an IQ threshold that Whites and Asians are far more likely to exceed than Blacks.
Oh wait, they weren't colonized because the natives so violently resisted colonization attempts.Replies: @Art Deco
Oh wait, they weren’t colonized because the natives so violently resisted colonization attempts.
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The disease environment made the African interior lethal until the late 19th century (bar the southernmost latitudes). Even after that, public heath and climate inhibited colonization. You had white soldiers, officials, missionaries, and mining engineers. You did not have many white settlers except in the temperate and subtropical zones and in the highlands.
I'm not talking about regulation, much less nationalization. I'm talking about the realities of private-equity "investment." The whole aim of private equity is to get in and get out, while making money for the partners, especially the general partner. It doesn't matter what the entity acquired is. Cost-cutting is the name of the game, and if the private-equity outfit can't find a buyer for the entity once it's done its number, the next step is liquidation--and that's a fairly frequent step. But private equity is only one aspect of the growing financialization of health care, especially when there's a trough of easy government money (Medicare, Medicaid) for the "private owners" to feed from, coupled with a population (frail old folks with declining cognition) that no one really gives two damns about. It's a creepy trend. The hospice industry is now mostly a for-profit racket, for example, where the business plan is to figure out whether to keep the residents alive to the max so as to suck up the Medicare/Medicaid or whether to get them down the greasy slide to the great beyond as "efficiently" as possible.Replies: @Anonymous, @Art Deco
The whole aim of private equity is to get in and get out, while making money for the partners, especially the general partner.
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Private equity is the last stop on the train to bankruptcy court. They’re making bets on unhealthy enterprises.
There is an unholy trinity of Leftist Media, Leftist Academics and Leftist Politicians who all
conspirecollaborate with each other. This same trinity was supposed to get gas ranges banned but the conspiracy got broken up before it could gain momentum. Leftist Academics do so bogus (government funded BTW) "study" and then the study gets publicized by the Leftist Press and then Leftist Politicians implement legislation based upon the "science". Follow the science, people!Replies: @Charlotte Allen, @Recently Based, @Alec Leamas (working from home), @Art DecoI suspect a well-crafted observational study might reveal that a commercial model is suboptimal in four sectors: medical care, long-term care, schooling, and legal services. More up the alley of economic sociology than of economics.
You still don’t seem to understand correlation. If a correlation is modest then of course it won’t mean much for individuals. Nobody disputes that. But it can still mean a lot for populations! That’s what people here care about.
“Populations”? If there’s only a “modest” correlation between head size and intelligence, isn’t there a “non-modest” non-correlation between head size and intelligence? In other words, if you drew a Venn diagram, there would be only a small sliver of overlap between the tiny heads and the tiny amounts of brainpower. Also vice versa. This is why “modest” correlations don’t mean much of anything.
The brain-measurers here are either unaware of, or prefer to ignore, the phenomenon of microencephalics who have hardly any brain matter but who have normal intelligence and normal personalities. These people are outliers, yes, but the existence of even one outlier like this disproves the theory that intelligence depends on a certain brain mass or brain configuration. It clearly does not.
I don’t mean this obnoxiously, but if you actually want to answer your question about the significance of a “modest” correlation for population differences, you need to spend the time to understand the (very simple) math of what a correlation coefficient is. All the “non-correlation” and Venn diagram stuff is basically nonsense.
That’s fascinating about microcephalics–I had no idea. I’ve also read about people who have lost parts of their brains through accidents or tumor surgery, and the functions associated with those parts simply move to other parts to make up. We know so little about how the brain really works.
Speaking personally, as a child of both suicides and also extremely tough muthaf#ckas who did NOT go down that road, I can tell you that suicide (barring extreme externalities like medical problems or political pressure) is often a product of just plain old madness.
The problem for blacks in America is that they get a double hit. If your parents are poor, it's probably because they are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. As poor stupid people, they are not going to provide you with the greatest home environment AND they are also going to bequeath to you their stupid genes (if nothing else) t00. So you are going to get it coming and going.Replies: @Chuck
In 2020 to 2021 outputted results for all brain regions, including whole brain volume, intracranial volume, white matter, and grey matter, and found that genetic ancestry explained the differences in this same sample. There was some covariance between parental SES, genetic ancestry, polygenic scores, and brain morphology, so you can quibble about pathways. But the results are AT LEAST AS consistent with a genetic as an environmental model. Of course I can’t get these results published.
Incidentally, it makes no scientific sense to control for intracranial volume but not genetic ancestry. ABCD has precomputed ancestry variables, so including them would not have been difficult.
He also had a pretty big head relative to his worth as a human being.Replies: @Art Deco
You’re projecting.
A correlation coefficient measures the relationship between two variables. The variables in question here are: 1) skull size, and 2) intelligence. If the number is low, there’s not a lot of relationship. If the number is high, there’s a lot. “Modest” correlation means not a lot. So what’s the problem here?
But that just makes his grift worse because he knows the "economics" he peddles is a joke.
I don't mean to go off on Reich but I guess I hate to see him in the same sentence as Friedman.Replies: @Prester John, @Unladen Swallow
I know Reich has been pushing this on Twitter recently, it was also something Galbraith was a big proponent of for years, despite there being very little empirical support for it in the economics literature. The funny thing is that a lot the Keynesian economists who came to prominence in the 1950’s and 60’s didn’t think much of Galbraith either, just like their free market opponents like Friedman and Stigler.
Yeah, well, I do a lot of things.
The thing about “HBD” is that people in it tend to see it as some sort of movement or belief, when it really isn’t. It’s nothing.
“Groups of people are different”. Gee, well, that’s not exactly a novel or brilliant insight, is it?
It was something considered as a pretty much obvious thing, for thousands of years.
So, I fail to see what’s so great or new about HBD, except for the obsession with IQ tests and the bogus Darwinian or psycho-evo explanationa for things that probably have other, better explanations.