Tag: science

The last conservative redoubt

This is one of the main reasons I have an amount of intellectual contempt for conservatives: they always, always, ALWAYS retreat to deceit, despite their professed devotion to virtue and morality, whenever the subject is race. Every single time. And usually, the first person they attempt to deceive is themselves. Consider the following debate between commenters at John C. Wright’s blog. I’m not linking to it because John has nothing to do with this and it was merely a tangent from a different discussion, it merely happens to be where I caught a conservative blatantly lying – again – about my clearly expressed opinions.

Overgrown Hobbit
Vox Day has stated that homogeneous nation states are good, and forced conglomeration of disparate groups to serve lawless powerful governments are bad. The larger the state, the more likely the tyranny, the smaller, the more likely the people have of self-determination. Even if what they want for themselves is a short fast path to self-destruction. What is the wisest end for the Spaniards? I don’t know. But on this Vox Day’s foundational errors, that race trumps culture and intelligence determines virtue, do not appear to be in play.

Bellomy
Does Vox Day think intelligence determines virtue? Ability to sustain a functioning culture, yes. Ability to understand the consequences of decisions, yes. But virtue? I am not so sure about that.

Overgrown Hobbit
What makes a people capable of sustaining a functioning culture? Back to you, sir.

Zaklog the Deplorable
I would say that a people’s average IQ is a significant factor there. Not the only one, but significant. Another important factor would be a high degree of societal trust, which is much easier to attain in homogenous societies.

Bellomy
But I’ve never seen him say intelligence=virtue. Intelligence=more elaborate rationalizing.

Scholar-at-Arms
Considering some of the criticisms he’s made on the limitations of intelligence on a personal level, I think you are right.

Zaklog the Deplorable
Yes, it is never a good sign for someone’s argument to me that they appear incapable of accurately representing their opponent’s beliefs, and on the subjects of race & IQ, most people who disagree with Vox Day appear to badly misrepresent what he says.

They reliably do, because they have to do so in order to avoid admitting the fatal weaknesses of their own positions. First, Overgrown Hobbit is demonstrably lying. I have not only never said, suggested, or implied that intelligence determines virtue, or even that it is a virtue, I have specifically stated the precise opposite.

“The fact that intelligence is not a virtue does not make it therefore fictional.”
– Vox Day, 14 September 2006

And in order to avoid giving her any wiggle room whatsoever, I will address her particular formulation. You can quote me on this: intelligence does not determine virtue. There are virtuous retards. There are profoundly evil geniuses. These things are entirely obvious to anyone who has paid even a modicum of attention to human history and human behavior. That “foundational error” simply does not exist.

Second, there are many things required to sustain a culture, and those things vary depending upon the nature of the culture. Virtue was not required to sustain the empire of the Aztecs, the conquering hordes of the Mongols, or the predatory roaming of the Arab tribes. But intelligence beyond a certain level is absolutely required to sustain a functioning culture that contains interior plumbing and electricity, among other desirable things.

Third, race does trump culture. It does not always do so on an individual basis, but it is more reliable than the Law of Supply and Demand on the macro level. This particular conservative failure is based on their stubborn determination  to rely on micro-level examples to determine the truth or falsehood of macro-societal concepts. Their opinions are not merely wrong, they are irrelevant, based as they are on inapplicable metrics, and from the scientific perspective, they are nonsensical.

Fourth, as Zaklog notes, and as I have previously observed, the argument for the Alt-Right is only strengthened by comparison with the feeble and dishonest nature of the arguments being made against it. The more they refuse to understand our case, or correctly characterize it, the more appeal it will hold for those who consider it honestly.

Fifth, note the tortuous way that Overgrown Hobbit reaches a conclusion that allows her to make a provably false statement. And finally, note that no matter how conservatives squawk, preen, posture, pose, and virtue-signal, they are still absolutely and utterly wrong about both race and immigration. Conservatism conserves nothing because it simply refuses to accept some of the less pleasant truths about the world.

Formerly “the most Republican county in America,” Orange County, California voted Democrat in 2016, after decades of immigration.

Programmed hate

Anonymous Conservative explains why it is so vital for Trump, and other Republicans, not to cuck on immigration:

The real problem President Trump must grasp is, conservatives have become programmed over these last few presidential cycles, and this conditioning has imbued a specific set of neural pathways. Too many times, we have had a politician espouse conservative, anti-leftist ideals to us, we got in line to support him, and then he either turned around in office and reversed his position to support a leftist position, or he took a “moderate” pro-left tone in the campaign and never even made it into office.

As a result of this history, conservatives have a whole lot of hatred and rage-circuits burned into their brains, just waiting to be triggered by a perception of betrayal, and attached to whoever is seen as doing the betrayal. If Donald turns around, in what most conservatives perceive as a time of war, and legalizes 800,000 new democrat voters, those circuits will all fire up throughout the movement.

As the research shows, once you attach such an aversive stimulus pathway to a concept in the amygdala, you cannot destroy that neural pathway, unlike in other areas of the brain. An amygdala pathway which triggers aversive stimulus never degrades, unlike mere memory circuits. It is permanent. At most, with extensive deconditioning work, you can create a second suppressive-circuit to suppress the amygdala trigger, but that secondary pathway is always weak in its operation. The initial aversive stimulus is easily re-triggered through it – a circumstance which destroys the suppressive pathway, and fully reestablishes the trigger.

What this means is, from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, if Trump allows the DACA-recipients any sort of path to voting, a large swath of his base will suddenly have a very negative sensation attach to him related to betrayal. Once that pathway is there, all any subsequent opponent will need to do is press that betrayal button to elicit the sensation.

I voted for George Bush twice, and really liked him as a person. But when I think of how he destroyed the party to support democrats and polish his own “moderate” credentials, it doesn’t matter what he does going forward. Those angry sensations of betrayal and anger will rise, no matter how nice he may be, no matter what he does. He will now always elicit negative feelings in me, and I would never support him or his family again. For a more detailed discussion of that, ask President Jeb Bush about it.

In my opinion, George W Bush was actually worse for the future prospects of the Bush family than even his ultra-leftist father, because W. pretended to be one of us. We all knew H.W. was shaky. When he went left it was no surprise. But W. pretended to be a Texas conservative. When he ultimately refused to attack the left, let all their attacks go unanswered, and handed the Presidency to Obama, the violation of expectation of betrayal made the amygdala-pathway that formed so strong that the entire Bush dynasty was destroyed, and even the full backing of the Establishment could not resurrect it.

Then there is also the issue of all the conservatives who have been fighting with other conservatives, defending President Trump’s conservatism during the campaign. Others would say he was a New York liberal who was merely pandering on immigration, and would ultimately legalize all of those leftist voters and kill the party. If the President reverses his position, he destroys the credibility of his defenders within the conservative movement. That would be yet another betrayal.

This is a minefield which goes beyond mere persuasion. There comes a point where amygdala begins to become so high that persuasion is ineffective. If someone kills your entire family, you will have enough amygdala that they will never be able to use persuasion to change how you feel. For conservatives, America is being destroyed, freedom is waning rapidly, and it is all due to liberalism. Leftists now violently attack any conservative who speaks openly in public. Leftism is now an enemy which we view with as much hate as any enemy our nation has faced in history.

He’s right. I am considerably more cool-tempered than most, I have no problem at all waiting extended periods of time to take my shots when necessary, and yet, there is literally nothing that any member of the Bush family, or any establishment Republican like Paul Ryan, can say that will allow me to even hear what they are saying. They might as well be Charlie Brown’s teacher as far as I am concerned. Wuaah-wa-wuaah-wa-wuaah….

Their past behavior has rendered them literally incredible to me and millions of others on the Right. This is the real reason the Alternative Right is inevitable, because so many of us no longer find the conservative movement, or the Republican Party, to be even potentially persuasive.

Another left-wing backfire

At this point, the Left can almost be defined as the ideology which regularly features policies which, when implemented, are guaranteed to provide results that are the reverse of those predicted.

Adriana Kugler, who teaches economics at Georgetown, recently published her research on the gender-gap in STEM fields. She found that STEM recruitment efforts that stress the gender-gap in STEM actually serves to discourage women.

“With the media, women are getting multiple signals that they don’t belong in the STEM field…”

“Society keeps telling us that STEM fields are masculine fields, that we need to increase the participation of women in STEM fields, but that kind of sends a signal that it’s not a field for women, and it kind of works against keeping women in these fields,” Kugler says.

Many of the common explanations for the lack of women in STEM don’t hold up under investigation, Kugler explained to Campus Reform. While previous research suggests women are less “resilient,” or more negatively impacted by “bad grades,” Kugler says there’s “no evidence” to support that.

Likewise, the claim that women do poorly in STEM solely because it’s male dominated isn’t supported by evidence either, Kugler says, noting that an aspiring female computer scientist won’t necessarily be turned away from knowing that the field is male dominated.

The trouble begins when the media and recruitment efforts capitalize on that preponderance of men, since it “sends an additional message to women that they don’t fit into those fields, and that they don’t belong there.”

“With the media, women are getting multiple signals that they don’t belong in the STEM field, that they won’t fit into the field. That’s what we find,” Kugler told Campus Reform. “It’s very well intentioned, but it may be backfiring.”

It’s not really that hard. If you write “here there be dragons” on a map, some people are going to believe you. And a disproportionate number of those people are going to be women.

It’s not that bad

And it’s really not that hard to figure out, either.

The concept of communication range was established by Leta Hollingworth. It is +/- 2 standard deviations (roughly 30 points) up or down on one’s own IQ. It denotes the range where meaningful interaction (communication, discussion, conversation and socializing) is possible. If the IQ difference between two persons is more than 30 points, the communication breaks up. The higher IQ person will look like an incomprehensible nerd and the lower IQ as a moronic dullard – and they will not find anything common.
+/- 30 points does not sound much, but once the IQ is past 135, the downsides are imminent. When someone has a perfectly mediocre IQ (100 for Caucasian average), his communication range is from IQ 70 to IQ 130, which covers some 98% of the whole population. But when it is 135, it is from 105 to 165, which is approximately 36% of population. And it gets worse: if it is 162, your whole meaningful set of human interactions is restricted to Mensa qualifying people only (2% of whole population). Good luck for finding friends, acquaintances, colleagues – or spouse.
And it gets worse.
When the average IQ of a group is lower than the lower end of your communication range, the group will see you as a hostile outsider. They will do anything to bully you out of their presence. They will ostracize, excommunicate and oust you amongst themselves.
Sorry, but this is basic human psychology. Human group dynamics dictates that when the diversity grows too big, the group becomes incooperable – the group interaction becomes impossible. And high IQ means exactly that.
You may say that nobody must left behind and that mobbing and bullying is nasty and unacceptable, but our biology dictates otherwise. Exclusion is the basis for co-operation. A group which does not exclude people differing from the norm off or otherwise eliminate their presence, becomes dysfunctional.
Let me put this bluntly: every single human being with IQ of 135+ has experienced this exclusion, ousting and loneliness. The stereotype of a lonely genius does not come from empty air. It is cruel reality. And each and every human being with IQ of 135+ has experienced such unhappiness and misery the mediocre IQ people can not even imagine in their nightmares. I have cried my cubic metre of tears.
And this issue – that unhappiness is due to loneliness and the loneliness is due to the communication range – is something very few high IQ people ever realize.

I suspect it is significant that this piece is written by a high IQ woman. It’s not only harder for them to find friends, it is MUCH harder for them to find romance. A man is just as happy with a less intelligent woman as a more intelligent woman, whereas a woman is unlikely to want to settle for a less intelligent man, just as she’s less inclined to settle for a shorter man.
I knew I was much more intelligent than the average from the age of four, but I had an even smarter friend from the age of five. So, while I certainly experienced my share of exclusion and ousting, I can’t honestly say I ever experienced much in the way of loneliness. And frankly, very intelligent kids tend to be more than a little obnoxious as well as somewhat dishonest with themselves; it’s fine if you decide to reject the way that people have settled on doing things, but then, you have to recognize that you are making a choice.
In that refusal to admit that they are making a choice, many a gamma male is made.

Priming is confirmed fake science

It’s sometimes a pity that science doesn’t have a simple “that’s obvious BS” card. Because I absolutely would have played it when the hypothesis of “priming” was not merely hypothesized, but asserted to be solid scientific fact:

In 2011, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman published a popular book, “Thinking Fast and Slow”, about an important finding in social psychology.
In the same year, questions about the trustworthiness of social psychology were raised.  A Dutch social psychologist had fabricated data. Eventually over 50 of his articles would be retracted.  Another social psychologist published results that appeared to demonstrate the ability to foresee random future events (Bem, 2011). Few researchers believed these results and statistical analysis suggested that the results were not trustworthy (Francis, 2012; Schimmack, 2012).  Psychologists started to openly question the credibility of published results.
In the beginning of 2012, Doyen and colleagues published a failure to replicate a prominent study by John Bargh that was featured in Daniel Kahneman’s book.  A few month later, Daniel Kahneman distanced himself from Bargh’s research in an open email addressed to John Bargh (Young, 2012):
“As all of you know, of course, questions have been raised about the robustness of priming results…. your field is now the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research… people have now attached a question mark to the field, and it is your responsibility to remove it… all I have personally at stake is that I recently wrote a book that emphasizes priming research as a new approach to the study of associative memory…Count me as a general believer… My reason for writing this letter is that I see a train wreck looming.”
Five years later, Kahneman’s concerns have been largely confirmed. Major studies in social priming research have failed to replicate and the replicability of results in social psychology is estimated to be only 25% (OSC, 2015).
Looking back, it is difficult to understand the uncritical acceptance of social priming as a fact.  In “Thinking Fast and Slow” Kahneman wrote “disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.”
Yet, Kahneman could have seen the train wreck coming. In 1971, he co-authored an article about scientists’ “exaggerated confidence in the validity of conclusions based on small samples” (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971, p. 105).  Yet, many of the studies described in Kahneman’s book had small samples.  For example, Bargh’s priming study used only 30 undergraduate students to demonstrate the effect.

I pay very little attention to “studies show” science for this reason.

IQ, exaggeration, and overrepresentation

Sargon‏ @Sargon_of_Akkad
Has the alt right come to terms with the fact the Jews are just better than they are?

Greg Matusow @gregmatusow
sounds like something a jew would say

Sargon‏ @Sargon_of_Akkad
Sounds like something a race realist who depends on IQ scores to say, you mean.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Your metric is incorrect, Sargon. First, there are 48 high-IQ Han, 11 high-IQ Europeans, and 5 high-IQ Japanese for every high-IQ Jew.

Sargon‏ @Sargon_of_Akkad
Of course, but that’s only because of population size.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Obviously. But you cannot claim they are not overrepresented in X because intelligent when there are 64 more intelligent non-Jews per Jew.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Second, average Jewish IQ is only 98, not 115.
Israel IQ = 95
Arab IQ (22.7%) = 84
Jewish IQ (77.3%) = 98

Now, it occurred to me that while I knew the oft-heard claim of a 115 average IQ for Jews was a misleading substitution of a subset for the set, and I had also observed that the claim was almost certainly an exaggeration in light of the average Israeli IQ of 95, I’d never actually run the numbers. The first thing was to update the population percentages according to the latest Israeli demographics, which currently has the Jewish population at 75 percent and the non-Jewish population at 25 percent.

This resulted in an average Israeli Jewish population IQ of 98.7 percent, slightly higher than my original calculation. Now, the Ashkenazi are 47.5 percent of the Israeli Jewish population, which means that if their average IQ is 115, the majority of the Jewish population of Israel has an average IQ of only 83.7, which is TWO standard deviations lower, and is also lower than the average IQs of Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, as well as Nigeria, Uganda, and the Israeli-Arab population.

Does that strike you as likely? No, me neither.

There is one Israeli study that found the difference between Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Jews in Israel to be 14 points. This would indicate an average Ashkenazi IQ of 106 and a non-Ashkenazi IQ of 92. This is considerably more credible, especially since it also happens to align with a number of studies on Ashkenazi IQ. Given that 74 percent of the global Jewish population is Ashkenazim, that means that the average Jewish IQ is 102.4.

So, average Jewish IQ is not particularly high, but is slightly higher than the European average, and considerably higher than the current US average, which I calculate to be around 95 and falling. Which, of course, is why high average intelligence is an inadequate explanation for the historical Jewish success in 20th-century America, as their level of comparative success is declining even as the IQ delta grows.

America, the overfed

Readers here well understand that government science is as intrinsically unreliable as anything else being produced by the government. And the U.S. government’s dietary advice has been about as bad as it gets.

“The change in dietary advice to promote low-fat foods is perhaps the biggest mistake in modern medical history.”

Let’s say you want to lose some weight. Which of these foods would you choose: A skim-milk latte, or the same drink with whole milk? A low-cal breakfast bar or steak and eggs? A salad tossed in light dressing or the same salad doused with buttermilk ranch?

If you’re like most Americans, you either aren’t sure how to answer, or you’re very sure—but very wrong. And it’s not your fault. It’s the fault, experts say, of decades of flawed or misleading nutrition advice—advice that was never based on solid science.

The US Department of Agriculture, along with the agency that is now called Health and Human Services, first released a set of national dietary guidelines back in 1980. That 20-page booklet trained its focus primarily on three health villains: fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol.

Recently, research has come out strongly in support of dietary fat and cholesterol as benign, rather than harmful, additions to person’s diet. Saturated fat seems poised for a similar pardon.

“The science that these guidelines were based on was wrong,” Robert Lustig, a neuro-endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told Tonic. In particular, the idea that cutting fat from a person’s diet would offer some health benefit was never backed by hard evidence, Lustig said.

Just this week, some of Lustig’s colleagues at UCSF released an incendiary report revealing that in the 1960s, sugar industry lobbyists funded research that linked heart disease to fat and cholesterol while downplaying evidence that sugar was the real killer.

I have to admit, my father called this one in the early 1990s. He never bought the “eating fat makes you fat” line, kept a low-carbohydrate diet, and stayed much slimmer than most of his peers as a result.

The thing is, you can work out all you like, but once you pass 40, the combination of becoming more injury-prone and your body metabolism slowing down means that your diet is a necessary component of losing weight. I’ve always been in the gym or on the soccer field at least three days per week, and I’ve never been that overweight, but I’ve dropped 13 pounds as part of my quest to get back my six-pack and return to my old fighting weight of 175 – I have four more to go –  and it is entirely the result of eating less and eating fewer carbohydrates.

It’s not about major changes, just getting your caloric intake south of the energy usage line. In my case, that means a cup of yogurt for breakfast instead of a bowl of cereal, a mochacino after lunch instead of dessert, and a smaller portion at dinner, no seconds, and no snacking. I still have three cappucini – sometimes four, including the one mocha – dessert, and two glasses of wine per day. So, it’s not exactly torture, just reasonable exercise combined with a modicum of self-discipline.

Note, by the way, that it’s not just Americans who have been affected by this disastrous dietary science. Keep that in mind when you consider the “global climate change consensus”.

In a recent editorial appearing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, researcher Zoe Harcombe from the University of the West of Scotland explains that obesity rates among British men and women rose from 2.7 percent in 1972 to 23 percent and 26 percent, respectively, by 1999.

Step 2: Eau de Poopy

The marketing possibilities are endless! Also, newsflash! People lie to survey-takers about politically correct issues:

A 2012 study by the Pew Research Center found that interracial marriages in the U.S. had doubled between 1980 and 2010 to about 15 percent, and just 11 percent of respondents disapproved of interracial marriage.

But new research from the University of Washington suggests that reported acceptance of interracial marriage masks deeper feelings of discomfort—even disgust—that some feel about mixed-race couples. Published online in July in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and co-authored by UW postdoctoral researcher Caitlin Hudac, the study found that bias against interracial couples is associated with disgust that in turn leads interracial couples to be dehumanized.

Lead author Allison Skinner, a UW postdoctoral researcher, said she undertook the study after noting a lack of in-depth research on bias toward interracial couples.

“I felt like the polls weren’t telling the whole story,” said Skinner, a researcher in the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.

The research involved three experiments. In the first, 152 college students were asked a series of questions about relationships, including how disgusted they felt about various configurations of interracial relationships and about their own willingness to have an interracial romance. The participants overall showed high levels of acceptance and low levels of disgust about interracial relationships, and pointed to a strong negative correlation between the two.

In the second experiment, the researchers showed 19 undergraduate students wedding and engagement photos of 200 interracial and same-race couples while recording their neural activity. The researchers asked the students to quickly indicate whether each couple should be included in a future study on relationships, a task that was intended to ensure participants were socially evaluating the couples while their neural activity was recorded.

Participants responded faster to images of same-race couples and selected them more often for inclusion in the study. More significantly, Skinner said, participants showed higher levels of activation in the insula—an area of the brain routinely implicated in the perception and experience of disgust—while viewing images of interracial couples.

“That indicates that viewing images of interracial couples evokes disgust at a neural level,” Skinner said.

As with all neuroscience studies, Skinner said, it is impossible to be certain whether the insula activation reflected a disgust response, since the insula is sometimes responsive to other emotions. But in combination with the other experiments, the authors believe it is evidence of a neural disgust response.

This part cracked me up: “Some people are still not comfortable with interracial relationships, or at least they’re a lot less comfortable than they would appear to be,” she said. “Acknowledging these biases is the first step to figuring out why people feel that way and determining what can be done so they won’t.”

What’s the point of attempting to neutralize the natural human disgust response? Why, it’s obvious!

Step 1: Fix the instinctive human reaction to interracial couples by artificially suppressing the disgust instinct.

Step 2: Launch Eau de Poopy perfume.

Step 3: Profit!

SJWs improve science

I’m sure this new SJW policy bodes well for science and academia. You know, say what you will about the National Socialists, but at least they had functional science. At this point, the options are rapidly coming down to a) the Alt-Right and indoor plumbing or b) mud huts and 30-year life expectancies.

Academics and scholars must be mindful about using research done by only straight, white men, according to two scientists who argued that it oppresses diverse voices and bolsters the status of already privileged and established white male scholars.

Geographers Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne argued in a recent paper that doing so also perpetuates what they call “white heteromasculinism,” which they defined as a “system of oppression” that benefits only those who are “white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered.” (Cisgendered describes people whose gender identity matches their birth sex.)

Mott, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Cockayne, who teaches at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, argued that scholars or researchers disproportionately cite the work of white men, thereby unfairly adding credence to the body of knowledge they offer while ignoring the voices of other groups, like women and black male academics. Although citation seems like a mundane practice, the feminist professors argue that citing someone’s work has implications on his or her ability to be hired, get promoted and obtain tenured status, among others….

“Today, the field is more diverse, but this diversity is largely represented by earlier career scholars. Citing only tenured, established scholars means that these voices are ignored, especially when it is well-known that today’s brutally competitive academic job market continues to privilege the white heteromasculinist body,” they wrote.

Actually, forget the Nazis. At this point, I’m beginning to conclude that the Khmer Rouge had the right approach to academia.

The ugliness of reality

And the logical gibberish of the anti-intelligent:

“No reasonable person would be offended by the observation that African people have curlier hair than the Chinese, notwithstanding the possibility of some future environment in which it is no longer true. But we can recognize a contention that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to be better table tennis players than Africans as silly, and the contention that they are smarter than Africans as ugly, because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.”

And they wonder why they’re so reliably wrong. You can certainly fight science, reason, and observation with “ethical principle” if you like, but it’s not going to work very well. Nor is it going to convince anyone with the intellectual ability to penetrate your rhetoric and understand the irrelevance of your ethical principles.

The idea that Chinese people are not smarter on average than Africans because the idea is ugly is like a programmer insisting that his code works correctly, despite the constant crashing of the program, because it is more elegantly written than the code that actually functions. Sometimes, indeed, very often, reality is ugly, or at least falls well short of what our aesthetic preferences would wish it to be.