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You are racist iff you believe races exist or should exist. If you are using the word race to denote cluster even though you know better, you are being irrespo
by ewofwkweoifd 11y ago
You are racist iff you believe races exist or should exist. If you are using the word race to denote cluster even though you know better, you are being irresponsible on purpose and I consider you a racist in the "races should exist" sense. Moldbug knows better, he's not a stupid cookie.
A good environment and good genetics are necessary for high IQ. You can't meaningfully measure the contribution of genetics in the absence of a good environment. We may as well debate AGW.
I don't have a problem with identifying genetic clusters (descendants of people from Africa), I don't have a problem with the existence of stereotypes (African Americans a.k.a. blacks do poorly on IQ tests), I just have a problem with people knowingly jumping to conclusions on the basis of science that isn't there (the black race has a genetically lower IQ and that's why they fundamentally make good slaves). Moldbug isn't insidious because he's wrong, he's insidious because he knows he's wrong. Perhaps more accurately, he knows that he can't prove that he's right but he hides it.
The Eulering article was interesting, cheers. I think the anthropologists probably have a lot to say about all this, filed under ethnocentrism.
P.S. Just as an aside, I think you need to consider that genes dilute fairly rapidly into a gene pool, that humans have been migrating forever, and that there are no real purebreeds or biracial people from a population biology perspective. That said, this isn't a denial of clustering.
P.P.S. It's probably just as intellectually lazy to claim that all population groups have the same level of genetic intelligence, it's just a lot less offensive.
- Tycho 11y agoWasn't Moldbug's mention of genetics in reference to physical attributes?
- Tycho 11y ago(apparently not)
- ewofwkweoifd 11y agoYeah I think it's primarily intelligence. (Although I've read only a tiny portion.) Odd in a way, because the physical attributes are easier to argue and test. My guess is that Moldbug would rather shoot for him being smarter by nature than him being weaker by nature.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoI must say I don't understand your position. You adopt a definition of "race" so extremely narrow that it doesn't describe anything in the real world. Then you use the term "cluster" to describe the same exact concept that most people use the term "race" to describe. Finally, you call people racist if they don't s/race/cluster/g. Why go through all this wordplay just to define most folks as racist? Why not simply adopt the common usage of the word "race"? And with this definition of racist (uses one set of jargon rather than another), why should we care if someone is racist? (I say your definition is uncommon because most people use "race" to refer to what you call "cluster". For example, the US Census asks for "race" rather than "cluster".)
- ewofwkweoifd 11y agoI guess in my experience people use the word race to mean any one of subspecies, cluster, or culture. Generally speaking, the biologists and the pro-genocide / pro-segregation people mean subspecies, the non-biologist geeks mean cluster, and the social scientists mean culture ("race is a social construct"). A lot of lay people don't really know what they mean. This just comes from asking people I talk to what they mean by race when they say race / racism / racist. So I just prefer to take the definition of race that we use for all other species, for the sake of accuracy. I can believe if in your experience everyone thinks race means cluster. And probably I could have gone on less of a polemic about it, so thanks for listening. Interestingly, someone told me once that the anthropologists say that the best way to classify humans is on the basis of the food they eat. I don't have a source for that but it just seems like such an effective way to partition people.