The hunter gatherer/christian/slave morality being dominant cancels any positive effects of implementing HBD. Free will deniers like Sam Harris and Sapolsky already are pretty aware of race differences and are still very upset about economic gaps berween races.Most left leaning elites have accepted luck egalitarian norms that no race realist views can shatter.
The hunter gatherer/christian/slave morality being dominant cancels any positive effects of implementing HBD. Free will deniers like Sam Harris and Sapolsky already are pretty aware of race differences and are still very upset about economic gaps berween races.Most left leaning elites have accepted luck egalitarian norms that no race realist views can shatter.
I don't recall that Harris or Sapolsky were calling for total equality of outcome between racial or ethnic groups, and if they've said otherwise I'd like to see your source on that.
The 'luck egalitarian' position is actually one I'm reasonably sympathetic to, though there are obvious caveats regarding feasible levels of wealth redistribution and the side-effects of maintaining eugenic fertility in a color-blind society, though if the elites want to push for designer baby subsidies or something it wouldn't be the worst of all worlds.
The left is not wrong about the top 1% absconding with most of society's economic gains over recent decades, by the way, which is something that can't be explained purely as a function of IQ diffs.
The argument there still isn't to bury HBD, but to convince the élites bothered by inequality of outcome that this is not a sufficient thing to worry about compared to overall wellbeing. Lower though it is than Euros, Afro-Americans of the United States still have a higher per-capita than all but the top ten-percent of nations. That number would be even higher if we dropped the shackles of race communism for our economy, whereas we could virtually end economic inequality between races by making it illegal to earn more than ten-thousand dollars a year; but outside literal commies, you sure as shit don't see people advocating that latter point.
Left hereditarian here. I think a lot of those on the right severely underestimate the psychological impact and also real world risks of unequal outcomes, even when general wellbeing is seeing improvements.
More gains going to those above me DOES harm me even if my material wellbeing has not immediately changed, and it is ridiculous to ask someone to accept material gains flowing to one's betters while asking them to be excluded from those gains. One's relative social status suffers, as does one's political power and relative market power, which makes the guarantee of protecting that current wellbeing more precarious.
The psychological responses to unequal treatment exist famously in monkeys, and when mating rights are on the table, widening resource accumulation is indeed a threat that the monkeys are correct to notice.
Relative social status IS a material concern when one can use their accumulated resources in politics, housing markets, future-proofing one's positions, tools to amplify one's speech and ideological positions, etc. No one wants to gamble their wellbeing, no matter how good it might currently be, on being a protectorate of some benevolent figure who could just as easily turn hostile competitor. Having 1 person exist with the market power of 100,000 is a threat to those 100,000. Not saying that he would, but Elon Musk could buy up all the eggs in the US tomorrow. Not saying he would, but that scenario could play out with housing, water rights, internet platforms, or all kinds of other areas where it is perfectly rational to not want capricious monopolies.
"More gains going to those above me DOES harm me even if my material wellbeing has not immediately changed, and it is ridiculous to ask someone to accept material gains flowing to one's betters while asking them to be excluded from those gains."
This is entitled narcissism. Why should we even care what narcissists think? We should only be ready to quickly imprison these people for life when they act out of line.
>More gains going to those above me DOES harm me even if my material wellbeing has not changed
No it doesn't! This is completely idiotic and the reason I reject leftist politics wholesale. It's also something you yourself assuredly don't believe in, as there are many countries in the world today with less income inequality than the United States. Countries which are both high income and with significantly lower costs of living, like Slovenia, Slovakia, or the Czech Republic; and no one ever, ever moves to them from the United States to get away from "income inequality". And these are nice countries which are in no danger of war and have excellent drinking water. You sure wouldn't see anyone consider heading to a lower-Gini country which is actually poor or dangerous to escape "income inequality", like Syria or Pakistan. They can't even get people to come to enjoy the lower cost of living.
Think about just how much better so many first worlders could live relative to others if they sold their possessions and moved to one of the countless countries much poorer than ourselves. Countries like El Salvador or Uruguay, which have much lower costs of living than the United States, lower rates of violent crime, and where most of the population speaks Spanish, which is about as easy a major language for Anglophones to learn as it gets. And yet there aren't even ten thousand American expats in these countries combined as of now! If any remotely significant fraction of people genuinely prioritized their wellbeing relative to others, countries like these should be absolutely swamped with first-worlders looking to enjoy living at a much higher social station than they do at home. But they never are. Instead, it's the opposite. There are tens of thousands of Uruguayans in the USA, and millions of Salvadorans. They would rather work at fucking gas stations here than sell their possessions and live like kings in their home countries!
The people have spoken. They want to be rich, and overwhelmingly choose to pursue said riches even when the opportunity for greater relative wealth is extremely easy. You'd think this'll cause at least some leftist reflection on the validity of their worldviews, but they never much care for the people of reality.
That doesn't come close to a rebuttal of my view that absolute wellbeing AND relative social status are both important. Obviously having sky-high opportunity and high-returns on achievement are a huge draw. We could map the foot traffic of a local casino vs. a local city park or hiking trail to make an appeal as to which is better for human thriving from the point of view of popularity. We could also map happiness index, longevity, familial ties, or all kinds of other metrics to the GINI coefficient if you want. But that's not what I was saying.
Relative social status declines when someone else in my society makes gains that do not flow to me (and those gains are expressed in terms of heightened status, spending power, resource allotment, etc). To completely write that off as an effect is a major blind spot. It simply doesn't comport with human psychology (which is adapted to notice unfairness for obvious biological reasons) or with acknowledgement of future risks to self that come from declining ability to compete across various market dynamic type social games.
Then why don't you, nor almost anybody else, move to one of the many, many countries on Earth where you'd have far higher status than you fo in the United States? You could live like a king in Botswana! Their professional class all speak English. Greencard-crazed women would throw themselves at you faster than you could track. But not only do you not do this; nobody else does neither! Not even two-thousand Americans live in Botswana. Only thirteen countries have at least a hundred thousand Americans, and half of them are first-world countries where you don't get to enjoy nearly as much status relative to others just for existing. Hence why there's more Americans in Germany alone, by a lot, than in all of Africa combined.
Egalitarianism is the sacred post-Christian belief of just about every Western liberal (in the expansive sense), esp the university-educated and people who work in culture and academia and politics.
It's like Diet Christianity Lite for our age where signals and markers have replaced actual beliefs and convictions.
The hunter gatherer/christian/slave morality being dominant cancels any positive effects of implementing HBD. Free will deniers like Sam Harris and Sapolsky already are pretty aware of race differences and are still very upset about economic gaps berween races.Most left leaning elites have accepted luck egalitarian norms that no race realist views can shatter.
I don't recall that Harris or Sapolsky were calling for total equality of outcome between racial or ethnic groups, and if they've said otherwise I'd like to see your source on that.
The 'luck egalitarian' position is actually one I'm reasonably sympathetic to, though there are obvious caveats regarding feasible levels of wealth redistribution and the side-effects of maintaining eugenic fertility in a color-blind society, though if the elites want to push for designer baby subsidies or something it wouldn't be the worst of all worlds.
Harris’s response to his house burning down in LA fire is to call for more taxes and less inequality.
I haven't watched the entire podcast, but he seems to be mentioning a few other factors here, including DEI fostering cynicism toward government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MB7hx1vc_I&ab_channel=SamHarris
The left is not wrong about the top 1% absconding with most of society's economic gains over recent decades, by the way, which is something that can't be explained purely as a function of IQ diffs.
The argument there still isn't to bury HBD, but to convince the élites bothered by inequality of outcome that this is not a sufficient thing to worry about compared to overall wellbeing. Lower though it is than Euros, Afro-Americans of the United States still have a higher per-capita than all but the top ten-percent of nations. That number would be even higher if we dropped the shackles of race communism for our economy, whereas we could virtually end economic inequality between races by making it illegal to earn more than ten-thousand dollars a year; but outside literal commies, you sure as shit don't see people advocating that latter point.
Left hereditarian here. I think a lot of those on the right severely underestimate the psychological impact and also real world risks of unequal outcomes, even when general wellbeing is seeing improvements.
More gains going to those above me DOES harm me even if my material wellbeing has not immediately changed, and it is ridiculous to ask someone to accept material gains flowing to one's betters while asking them to be excluded from those gains. One's relative social status suffers, as does one's political power and relative market power, which makes the guarantee of protecting that current wellbeing more precarious.
The psychological responses to unequal treatment exist famously in monkeys, and when mating rights are on the table, widening resource accumulation is indeed a threat that the monkeys are correct to notice.
Relative social status IS a material concern when one can use their accumulated resources in politics, housing markets, future-proofing one's positions, tools to amplify one's speech and ideological positions, etc. No one wants to gamble their wellbeing, no matter how good it might currently be, on being a protectorate of some benevolent figure who could just as easily turn hostile competitor. Having 1 person exist with the market power of 100,000 is a threat to those 100,000. Not saying that he would, but Elon Musk could buy up all the eggs in the US tomorrow. Not saying he would, but that scenario could play out with housing, water rights, internet platforms, or all kinds of other areas where it is perfectly rational to not want capricious monopolies.
"More gains going to those above me DOES harm me even if my material wellbeing has not immediately changed, and it is ridiculous to ask someone to accept material gains flowing to one's betters while asking them to be excluded from those gains."
This is entitled narcissism. Why should we even care what narcissists think? We should only be ready to quickly imprison these people for life when they act out of line.
>More gains going to those above me DOES harm me even if my material wellbeing has not changed
No it doesn't! This is completely idiotic and the reason I reject leftist politics wholesale. It's also something you yourself assuredly don't believe in, as there are many countries in the world today with less income inequality than the United States. Countries which are both high income and with significantly lower costs of living, like Slovenia, Slovakia, or the Czech Republic; and no one ever, ever moves to them from the United States to get away from "income inequality". And these are nice countries which are in no danger of war and have excellent drinking water. You sure wouldn't see anyone consider heading to a lower-Gini country which is actually poor or dangerous to escape "income inequality", like Syria or Pakistan. They can't even get people to come to enjoy the lower cost of living.
Think about just how much better so many first worlders could live relative to others if they sold their possessions and moved to one of the countless countries much poorer than ourselves. Countries like El Salvador or Uruguay, which have much lower costs of living than the United States, lower rates of violent crime, and where most of the population speaks Spanish, which is about as easy a major language for Anglophones to learn as it gets. And yet there aren't even ten thousand American expats in these countries combined as of now! If any remotely significant fraction of people genuinely prioritized their wellbeing relative to others, countries like these should be absolutely swamped with first-worlders looking to enjoy living at a much higher social station than they do at home. But they never are. Instead, it's the opposite. There are tens of thousands of Uruguayans in the USA, and millions of Salvadorans. They would rather work at fucking gas stations here than sell their possessions and live like kings in their home countries!
The people have spoken. They want to be rich, and overwhelmingly choose to pursue said riches even when the opportunity for greater relative wealth is extremely easy. You'd think this'll cause at least some leftist reflection on the validity of their worldviews, but they never much care for the people of reality.
That doesn't come close to a rebuttal of my view that absolute wellbeing AND relative social status are both important. Obviously having sky-high opportunity and high-returns on achievement are a huge draw. We could map the foot traffic of a local casino vs. a local city park or hiking trail to make an appeal as to which is better for human thriving from the point of view of popularity. We could also map happiness index, longevity, familial ties, or all kinds of other metrics to the GINI coefficient if you want. But that's not what I was saying.
Relative social status declines when someone else in my society makes gains that do not flow to me (and those gains are expressed in terms of heightened status, spending power, resource allotment, etc). To completely write that off as an effect is a major blind spot. It simply doesn't comport with human psychology (which is adapted to notice unfairness for obvious biological reasons) or with acknowledgement of future risks to self that come from declining ability to compete across various market dynamic type social games.
Then why don't you, nor almost anybody else, move to one of the many, many countries on Earth where you'd have far higher status than you fo in the United States? You could live like a king in Botswana! Their professional class all speak English. Greencard-crazed women would throw themselves at you faster than you could track. But not only do you not do this; nobody else does neither! Not even two-thousand Americans live in Botswana. Only thirteen countries have at least a hundred thousand Americans, and half of them are first-world countries where you don't get to enjoy nearly as much status relative to others just for existing. Hence why there's more Americans in Germany alone, by a lot, than in all of Africa combined.
Egalitarianism is the sacred post-Christian belief of just about every Western liberal (in the expansive sense), esp the university-educated and people who work in culture and academia and politics.
It's like Diet Christianity Lite for our age where signals and markers have replaced actual beliefs and convictions.