As professors like E.O. Wilson and Steven Pinker learned the hard way, the Blank Slate is the most sacred piece of dogma for Leftists (and for the liberals who are usually also fundamentalists when it comes to racial issues).
The Blank Slate is the skeleton key for the Left project of "socialist liberation", which is predicated on the idea that we're all interchangeable meat widgets that can be properly programmed with "critical consciousness" as long as a Left commissar can sink their teeth into our brains at as young an age as possible.
They will never relinquish it, no matter what facts intervene, and will viciously attack anyone who threatens it, because the Blank Slate (in their minds) gives them carte blanche to reprogram all of us into members of their cultish political project.
It's a lot easier to "fix" this problem if people accept the genetic explanation. Imagine people like Michelle and Barack Obama having 5 children instead of 2. And Floyd Mayweather having none instead of 5. The problem will fix itself within a few generations.
There is more than just genes or environment. There is also culture, which has the properties of an inheritance system. Performance in academics or aptitude tests are affected by motivation. Students who try hard will perform better than those who do not, all else being equal. Jews come from a group who faced various degrees of discrimination. Those who managed to thrive in such societies necessarily developed a culture of accomplishment and this shows up in test scores. East Asians living in Confucian societies lived in a world where the only way to get ahead was to do well in school, if one got the chance. So, parents push the kids harder, and it shows up in performance. Among white Americans you have a whole range of motivation, from very achievement-orientated households to households where academic performance is discouraged. Hence their performance is intermediate between that of Jews or Asians and those of blacks or Latins.
As for the descendants of slaves, many inherited a culture in which it was adaptive to not be ambitious (uppity) because that could get you killed. Even after emancipation, lynching was a consequence for the uppity for eighty years. Jim Crow was only lifted in the mid-1960's, but the prospects for economic advancement for black and white working-class men were sharply diminished around 1973 when the long-term rising trend in real wages stopped. This "escalator out of poverty" ended. Meanwhile, those blacks who had done fairly well despite Jim Crow could access affirmative action programs and rapidly advance. Such an environment was not conducive to the evolution of a culture of academic effort (athletic effort is a different story) among either poor blacks or those in the working and middle classes. We see degradation of white performance over this time in lower income groups.
Also, just because a trait is highly genetically heritable doesn't mean that population differences reflect genetic differences. For example, height has a very high genetic component, higher than IQ. Ad yet the primary determinant of height differences among populations is nutritional, not genetic. In the 19th century, Dutch people were much shorter than Americans, today they are the tallest people in the world.
This is perhaps THE topic that adversarial collaboration would help elucidate. We need a study(ies) written and conducted by people who fall on all levels of the opinion spectrum to come together and design agreed upon experiments to try and get to the bottom of this.
I'm pessimistic it'll be happening anytime soon though.
100 years of throwing money at trying to improve outcomes for blacks only lowered meritorious outcomes for other races and made the black community dependent on the state, while overall lowering the average IQ in the country. If you keep trying to lift someone up that isn't trying to lift themselves up you are only putting them on a pedestal and if they are demonstrably lessers (iq, crime rates, nuclear families, social cohesion, charitable contribution, drug use, abortion)......why are you lifting up mediocrity? Look around at the results of lifting up mediocrity, from from a utilitarian perspective, you fucked over the minority for the majority, by pretending the majority was the minority. Europeans are a "world wide minority" while negroid africans are the 3rd largest global majority.
There’s a brand of conservative policy that recognizes the significance of luck in social outcomes. It is the basis for conservative subsidy for kids and healthcare. To my mind, high or low IQ is another variety of luck, and could justify conservative subsidies, if a readily available proxy for individual IQ was identified. Earning are probably a rough proxy, but I don’t have any notion of how rough that would be.
Why talk about race differences?
As professors like E.O. Wilson and Steven Pinker learned the hard way, the Blank Slate is the most sacred piece of dogma for Leftists (and for the liberals who are usually also fundamentalists when it comes to racial issues).
The Blank Slate is the skeleton key for the Left project of "socialist liberation", which is predicated on the idea that we're all interchangeable meat widgets that can be properly programmed with "critical consciousness" as long as a Left commissar can sink their teeth into our brains at as young an age as possible.
They will never relinquish it, no matter what facts intervene, and will viciously attack anyone who threatens it, because the Blank Slate (in their minds) gives them carte blanche to reprogram all of us into members of their cultish political project.
It's a lot easier to "fix" this problem if people accept the genetic explanation. Imagine people like Michelle and Barack Obama having 5 children instead of 2. And Floyd Mayweather having none instead of 5. The problem will fix itself within a few generations.
There is more than just genes or environment. There is also culture, which has the properties of an inheritance system. Performance in academics or aptitude tests are affected by motivation. Students who try hard will perform better than those who do not, all else being equal. Jews come from a group who faced various degrees of discrimination. Those who managed to thrive in such societies necessarily developed a culture of accomplishment and this shows up in test scores. East Asians living in Confucian societies lived in a world where the only way to get ahead was to do well in school, if one got the chance. So, parents push the kids harder, and it shows up in performance. Among white Americans you have a whole range of motivation, from very achievement-orientated households to households where academic performance is discouraged. Hence their performance is intermediate between that of Jews or Asians and those of blacks or Latins.
As for the descendants of slaves, many inherited a culture in which it was adaptive to not be ambitious (uppity) because that could get you killed. Even after emancipation, lynching was a consequence for the uppity for eighty years. Jim Crow was only lifted in the mid-1960's, but the prospects for economic advancement for black and white working-class men were sharply diminished around 1973 when the long-term rising trend in real wages stopped. This "escalator out of poverty" ended. Meanwhile, those blacks who had done fairly well despite Jim Crow could access affirmative action programs and rapidly advance. Such an environment was not conducive to the evolution of a culture of academic effort (athletic effort is a different story) among either poor blacks or those in the working and middle classes. We see degradation of white performance over this time in lower income groups.
Also, just because a trait is highly genetically heritable doesn't mean that population differences reflect genetic differences. For example, height has a very high genetic component, higher than IQ. Ad yet the primary determinant of height differences among populations is nutritional, not genetic. In the 19th century, Dutch people were much shorter than Americans, today they are the tallest people in the world.
Thanks for the laugh about that hilarious “ study “ on black brains. Going to assume there’s a few Jews involved in this sham study.
This is perhaps THE topic that adversarial collaboration would help elucidate. We need a study(ies) written and conducted by people who fall on all levels of the opinion spectrum to come together and design agreed upon experiments to try and get to the bottom of this.
I'm pessimistic it'll be happening anytime soon though.
100 years of throwing money at trying to improve outcomes for blacks only lowered meritorious outcomes for other races and made the black community dependent on the state, while overall lowering the average IQ in the country. If you keep trying to lift someone up that isn't trying to lift themselves up you are only putting them on a pedestal and if they are demonstrably lessers (iq, crime rates, nuclear families, social cohesion, charitable contribution, drug use, abortion)......why are you lifting up mediocrity? Look around at the results of lifting up mediocrity, from from a utilitarian perspective, you fucked over the minority for the majority, by pretending the majority was the minority. Europeans are a "world wide minority" while negroid africans are the 3rd largest global majority.
human dignity
One reason to not talk about something is that it keeps exploitation of the thing from being discussed as well.
There’s a brand of conservative policy that recognizes the significance of luck in social outcomes. It is the basis for conservative subsidy for kids and healthcare. To my mind, high or low IQ is another variety of luck, and could justify conservative subsidies, if a readily available proxy for individual IQ was identified. Earning are probably a rough proxy, but I don’t have any notion of how rough that would be.
"Plenty of things, after all, are true that prudent people may find too offensive or too trivial to write about."
Is there an example of something that is true that you would find too offensive to write about?
You'll have my favorite polemic gentrified by normal-one-havers.