History – discoveries, revolutions, innovations – has always been made by the select few: The extraordinarily intelligent, and the extraordinarily driven and curious.
It is easy to proxy the former (IQ tests), but quantifying the latter is more difficult.
My suggestion: Look at the demographic composition of the “out of left field” groups whose equivalents would have met up at the 18th century coffee salons of London and Paris to discuss the separation of powers and the settlement of the Americas.
I did this for six such major communities:
- Occupy Wall Street 2011: Online n=5,006 survey of visitors to occupywallst.org in October 21-22, 2011.
- Black Rock City Census 2014: Online n=11,707 survey (that’s 1/5.5 of total participants that year).
- Transhumanists 2012: Online n=818 poll of people in people who frequent transhumanist forums and communities organized by Hank Pellissier (whom I thank for giving me access to the data).
- LessWrong 2014: Online n=1,503 survey of the LessWrong rationalist community.
- LessWrong 2016: Online n=3,083 survey of the LessWrong “diaspora” (now to a significant extent Scott Alexander’s readers). My demographic analysis of this community.
- Effective Altruism 2017: Ongoing n=2,147 survey since 2014.
- Slate Star Codex 2018: Online n=8,077 survey of Scott Alexander’s blog readers.
Racial Demographics
| Whites | Asians | Blacks | Hispanics | Jews | S.Asians | Other | |
| US Census 2010 | 72.4% | 4.8% | 12.6% | 16.3% | ~2.0% | ~1.0% | |
| Occupy Wall Street 2011 | 81.2% | 2.8% | 1.6% | 6.8% | 7.6% | ||
| Burning Man 2014 | 87.0% | 5.7% | 1.3% | 6.3% | 6.3%+ | 0.4%+ | 4.9% |
| Transhumanists 2012 | 85.3% | 3.3% | 1.4% | 1.3%+ | |||
| LessWrong 2014 | 86.1% | 3.9% | 0.8% | 2.1% | ~9.4% | 2.2% | 3.9% |
| LessWrong 2016 | 87.3% | 3.5% | 0.4% | 1.9% | ~11.9% | 1.9% | 4.1% |
| Slate Star Codex 2018 | 88.0% | 3.6% | 0.5% | 2.0% | ~9.8% | 2.4% | 2.8% |
Before we go further, I would argue that the H+/EA/LW-sphere are actually less conformist than both OWS and Burning Man. One is a standard Leftist protest movement, and not a particularly radical one at that, and while it was once countercultural, Burning Man has long been suborned by… well, The Man. To the contrary, discussing the efficacy of different nootropics, trying to quantify the conscious experience of a parakeet, and analyzing the different takeoff scenarios for superintelligence really is quite… eccentric, in the best sense of that very English word, not to mention a great deal more g-loaded than camping out in Central Park or the Nevada desert. I would wager that these people are some of the likeliest to achieve major successes in culture, science, and technology on a per capita basis.
The first thing that jumps out is the substantial underrepresentation of Hispanics, the severe underrepresentation of Blacks, and the astounding overrepresentation of Jews – a pattern present across all groups, but particularly extreme in the Rationalism sphere. This is no puzzle for non-IQ deniers, so I will leave this without further comment.
The second notable thing is the relative underrepresentation of Asians, and the overrepresentation of Whites; a pattern that holds even when you subtract Jews from Whites. This is especially puzzling when you consider that Asian-Americans (median age – 36) are considerably younger than American Whites (median age – 43), though perhaps this is counterbalanced by some fraction of them hiding out in the “Other” and/or multiracial categories.
It is however less of a puzzle to those aware of the “Asian Paradox” in HBD discussions – the tendency for East Asian nations to outperform White ones on IQ tests, but to underperform them on scientific output (e.g. Japan produces less elite science than either Germany or the UK, despite a higher average national IQ and a much bigger population of 127 million versus 82 million and 65 million, respectively) and even on economic productivity. 52 million South Koreans produce about as much elite science as 8 million Swiss, as proxied by the number of annual publications in Nature. This is despite Japan having no NAMs to drag its average down, as in the US and much of Europe.
This general pattern pertains to Asian Americans as well, which suggests that not only cultural/national factors are involved. Although they score substantially higher than American Whites on IQ tests, and are vastly overrepresented amongst elite college enrollments – around 40% at Caltech, and 15% at other colleges where they are discriminated against by affirmative action, according to the numbers compiled by Ron Unz – non-boring accomplishment tend to trail off after that point. For instance, (the Japanese researcher) Kenya Kura notes: “Among undergrads, 40% or more are Asians, but graduate students are something like 20% (depending on departments). Faculty members are well less than 10%.” (This is not a difference that can be wholly or even mostly ascribed to the different age structure of the White and East Asian population). On the other hand, they do go on to make a lot more money than Whites (something that SJW propagandists of “white privilege” studiously ignore). This suggests East Asians in particular have a proclivity towards taking the safe, conformist, socially respectable, path in life.
Incidentally, I would also note that the one “out of left field” group in which East Asians are slightly overrepresented is Burning Man (though this vanishes when you consider that many of its participants come from the West Coast). However, it has long ceased to be any sort of particularly subversive and countercultural undercurrent – certainly by 2014, which is when the cited survey was taken. Over the past several years, Burning Man has been trending its way into the Californian SWPL memeplex, complete with corporate endorsements, luxury camps for Silicon Valley oligarchs, and police crackdowns on its old freewheeling drugs and nudist culture. Can’t get much more straight-laced than that.
Tries hard to make a feminist point, but sort of makes the opposite one.
Sex Demographics
| Men | Women | |
| Occupy Wall Street 2011 | 61.0% | 37.5% |
| Burning Man 2014 | 58.2% | 40.6% |
| Transhumanists 2012 | 90.1% | 9.9% |
| LessWrong 2014 | 87.2% | 11.9% |
| LessWrong 2016 | 83.6% | 16.4% |
| Effective Altruism 2017 | 70% | 26% |
| Slate Star Codex 2018 | 89.9% | 10.1% |
Women don’t differ much from men in terms of IQ (serious estimates range from equality to a 5 point disadvantage), though they do have thinner tails, so there are significantly fewer very intelligent women than there are very intelligent men and this starts to become an increasingly important factor from around IQ=130 or so. Moreover, women are marginally superior in terms of verbal IQ, which tends to correlate best with worldly success. However, as is well known, sex differences in human accomplishment is where pure IQ reductionism – despite its general successes – fails most thoroughly and consistently, regardless of 20th century feminist achievements (women accounted for 4% of Nobel Prize winners in literature and the sciences in 1900-1950, and 3% in 1950-2000).
Women have near parity in Burning Man participation and Occupy Wall Street. Neither are principally anti-systemic, both have a sort of a cool/fun factor to which ordinary people are drawn to, and OWS in particular has a marked Leftist tilt (politically, relative to men, women are conformist Leftists). However, the female share falls to around 10% in the rationalist-sphere, which is much more g-loaded (average IQ is at least 2 S.D. above the average), and where you can only really have fun if you have a very specific personality type (rational, open-minded, abstract, data-centric). If we are to assume that membership/participation in them can be considered a proxy for curiosity as well as IQ, and bearing in mind that the discovery threshold for major new scientific discoveries is perhaps another S.D. or two higher than for participating in those communities, then the lingering paucity of female achievement in those areas to this day becomes more intuitively understandable.
The Effective Altruism community is basically a less abstract/more practical extension of the rationalist community, with strongly charitably overtones, so women are more prevalent within it.
Speculations
1. Sociological concepts like “structural oppression” has never explained anything well, so why should the “bamboo ceiling” be an exception? As opposed to qualities such as curiosity actually being important for management and CEO positions?
- Maybe, just maybe – as John Derbyshire seems to have intuited – elite college discrimination against Asians actually serves a purpose?
At least if your goal is not fairness, or pure meritocracy, or increasing the supply of quality doctors and lawyers and engineers… but maximizing the rate of innovation.
- There doesn’t seem to be any reason the above argument can’t be extended to women.
My take on it – for whatever it’s worth…
This stuff is dead in the water if you guys cannot get a significant amount of females on board. The normal child-bearing kind – not like homegirl:
http://www.annemariewaters.org/
From every survey I have seen; 1) females are more religious/spiritual than men even in very secular societies and 2) the conversion our community is getting is top-heavy with women (sometimes 3 to 4 times the number of men).
You guys need to have a spiritual platform. You guys are shooting yourselves in the foot by constantly touting IQ and rationality and science. Look, I’m a Muslim guy that’s been with exactly one woman my whole life and even I know this stuff has marginal appeal to women.
Time to up the game.
Peace.
Occupy Wall Street % of Jews is 0.
I wonder if that is because the Occupied Wall Street % is much greater than 2%? 🙂
“You guys”? Just to clarify, I’m not Alt Right, let alone interested in doing PR and minority outreach for them. 🙂
My aim here is to try to understand reality. Visitorship and popularity are very much secondary considerations.
Thanks for the clarification Mr. Karlin. I don’t want to put you in a box you don’t care to be in.
My point still stands with the general HBD/Alt-Right/WN sphere…they need women. Actually, they need women willing to be mothers. And not a marginal number of them either – speaking of rationality, this is basic mathematics.
The transhumanist advocates might not need this – that’s what Axlotl tanks are for. 🙂
Peace.
The normal child-bearing kind
They don’t want to have babies anymore, anybody can do that, they want to save the planet.
Speaking of which, it is in such bad shape that they don’t dare bring a child into it.
Newton was an incel!
But no, reproduction doesn’t have a lot to do with transmission of knowledge – that has been circumvented through the development of the writing system. Interesting, if somewhat disappointing statistics for East Asians.
I think a key to this is really to see if creativity and curiousity is something that can be developed, at least to a larger extent than what we know of intelligence.
This is a good point – pessimism will always lose out in the end – it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Peace.
Incidentally, I would say that this would also suggest that the Alt-right proper, at least in its guise in the US, would be unlikely to produce many innovative thinkers as there are an increasing number of “tribal markers” such as an objection to the notion of any anthrocentric climate change and a strong inclination toward primitivism.
I suspect that one of the negative externalities of such tribal markers is a reduction in the quality of innovation solutions; insofar as popularity matters – if certain ideas are seen as heretical within the subculture and cannot be discussed within that subculture, it reduces the ability of such ideas to fully develop through debate.
Re the ‘spiritual platform’ and women – your interesting comment –
Don’t think you are correct re the ‘alt-right’ or national sovereigntist etc movements … but you have an important point re civilisation as a whole
Significantly revolutionary movements tend to be quite male, with some notable exceptions amongst the revolutionaries of course … Political innovation is ultimately ‘innovation’ indeed, in line with what is discussed in AK’s article above
Re sprituality, it is quite true that there is in fact a gigantic ‘god-hole’ where something spiritual is not there, and civilisation rather chokes eventually without it, as ours is choking now … atheism is flat, doesn’t hold, atheists fade away and don’t have so many children
For Western people in general, the Abrahamic traditions have dead-ended, there is just too much in the Talmud – Bible – Qur’an that seems to us rather ugly and horrific (eternal hell, ‘God-ordered’ genocides, mutilating children’s genitals ‘by God’s command’ etc) … of course nice great beautiful stuff too but the ugly stuff is too strongly present to our modern Western eyes
My observation is that Muslims, having started later than the other Abrahamic religions, are on the same course with a time lag of a few centuries … Muslims – like Christian Protestants a few hundred years back, are having a gigantic go-round now, regarding what the ‘holy book’ really entails … but at the end, what happens, is that people see it as an in part rather cruel human book, not a holy book, a mixture of good and bad, and that is slowly hitting Muslims now too it seems
Part of the animus Westerners have re Islamic extremism today, is that we are looking in a mirror … that was ourselves not too long ago, when Christians were doing all sorts of ISIS-type horrors
We also have a problem in the West, recovering our paganism, even to the mild degree of the gentle nature-paganism ceremonial still in, e.g., Japan
Western paganism was too cruel – animal sacrifice, ugh – and on top of it, it was too shallow, it seemed we never had the finer parts of Asian paganism, the meditation, the yoga, the great depth of natural healing practices … not to mention the Kama Sutra and the Temples of Khajuraho
Though some of us follow the Asian ways, with great spiritual rewards … we meditate, we can feel the reality that this is not the only world … we Westerners yet still don’t en masse feel ‘at home’ if we declare ourselves Daoist or Hindu or Buddhist … we Westerners haven’t quite hit on the right formula yet to be spiritual but within our culture, now that Abrahamic faiths are in the dustbin for us
In the Asian religions, the great texts are not ‘binding holy books’ like with Abrahamic faiths … yet it is remarkable how, by contrast, the greatest Asian spiritual classics, the Bhagavad-Gita or Dao De Ching, are much gentler than the Talmud – Bible – Qur’an, the Asian classics have so much less of the horrible stuff … Here, Hinduism’s most beloved work, the Bhagavad-Gita, its story told in a great 10-minute video drama … God explains to a warrior (an alt-right type?) what life is all about
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ205esn7qE
That’s going to be pretty darn hard when one of the foundational beliefs of the “Movement” is, “We can prefer Chinks to you, but you’d better not look at a Nigger/Sand Nigger.”
Ironically, Existential Comics was (is?) popular on the absolute sewer of grad student intelligence signalling that is r/badphilosophy.
Since this seems to be a topic of interest, I looked at the fertility rates.
Completed fertility rate of 40-49 year old American women amongst the SSC respondents is around 1.48 children, which is about half a child less than the average for the US as of the early 2010s.
https://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/1960s-2-big-2.png
Looking at the rationalist-sphere as essentially a high IQ community, this tallies with JayMan’s observations of a 0.5 child gap between women who got 10/10 on the WORDSUM test and the average.
Hey Brabantian,
This is the problem. Even the people that apostate from Islam vastly go in this direction. Look up the big name ex-Muslims – most don’t have kids – a couple of them have one or two. It’s a genetic dead end. Which is really bizarre, because one would assume that atheism correlates with belief in Darwinian models of evolution/survival – which means people are literally acting in opposition to their own conceptual framework – whack!
Eventually? Likely. All part of the grand picture:
“‘Verily, you will follow the path of those who came before you, step by step and inch by inch, such that if they entered the hole of a lizard you would follow.’ We said, ‘O Messenger of Allah, do you mean the Jews and Christians?’ The Prophet said, ‘Who else?'” – reported in Bukhari & Muslim
Check – though there is a minority opinion this is not the case.
We actually don’t believe that.
You mean circumcision? I guess this is kind of where things get weird, I mean – if one insists on calling it mutilation, then I guess there’s not much room for discussion. I got my three sons circumcised; two of them were done by White female pediatricians.
I get this – I don’t think there’s any doubt Islam will remain pre-modern in a certain sense; that is its strength from our perspective. I mean, the name does mean “submission” – so it doesn’t really beat around the bush. The great moral truths don’t change – sure, certain rules get adjusted with human progress, but the bedrock is firm. Again, this attracts certain people, repels others. I’m not sure going hole-hog with post-modernism is even desirable based on everything going on – and often what people are complaining about on these very forums.
I totally get that. A lot of the issue is that the Salafi-Wahhabi uprising which should have been buried in the sands of Arabia after the Ottomans crushed them were given a new lease on life by the Brits (which wouldn’t have been too bad) – but then they hit black gold – and that really, really screwed things up. We are still dealing with the aftermath. The good thing is the last outburst has even got the Salafi-Wahhabi guys rethinking things because of how crazy it’s gotten and the tracks lead back to them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyHeRImQOl0
That is not to say Islamic history is clear from extremist strains – it isn’t. These will keep on popping up once in a while until history ends. Like you said; beautiful sides of religion and ugly sides…
Totally agree – much more refined in the East.
Not sure about this. I do not have much hopes for the Salafi-Wahhabi track in the West. It seems it will eventually peter out once the funding stops. And most Westerners don’t really like it for the same reason you’ve described – it’s basically trying to force Islam through a desert-Bedouin sieve and presenting it to the West. Not gonna happen.
However – Islam as practiced by the Sufis is a whole other ball game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xiJiBbMQAg
(I can’t endorse this person, because I don’t know their background, but their analysis on self-realization is spot on and very close to what my teachers teach.)
This is how it historically spread in the Balkans. Prof. David Cook of Rice University estimated that 9 out of 10 converts go to the Sufis. This does have a lot of the spirituality, meditation, character-building that you are mentioning, which is why even Hindus revere and visit Sufi mausoleums to this day in India.
The interesting thing is that I don’t think women – though they are often more spiritual than men (the Sufi teacher of some of my friends mentioned that his students that make the most rapid spiritual progress are simple house-wives who are dedicated to and sacrifice for their families, they have a much easier time stepping on their egos than men) – are the “content creators” even in this realm of human endeavor. They consume spirituality and benefit from it but I don’t think you can expect them to be the public face of a spiritual revival.
Either way, it seems time is of the essence in getting that piece on track – if it’s going to be Hinduism* – then take it and run with it because something seriously needs to change.
Peace.
*Note: Thanks for that interesting video by the way.
Interesting, so it seems there is kind of a sweet spot; smart but not too smart. As Prof. Dutton mentioned in that video you posted on intelligence; seems one can be too smart for their own good.
I’m actually of the opinion (like him) – and it seems this data correlates to it – that human beings seem to select out for those of us that have too much intelligence because it is detrimental to other traits necessary for survival. Not saying the highly intelligent don’t contribute to the human condition, they obviously do – just not so much for their own genetic legacy.
Can’t escape the Law of Averages I suppose.
Peace.
the muslim / non-muslim fertility differential is small compared to the subsaharan / nonsubsaharan fertility differential. If current trends continue Muslim aswell as non-Muslim Caucasians and East Asians will get overrun by both muslim and christian subsaharan Africans.
It seems some of the Asian vs European achievement gap is alway assumed not to be explained by HBD but culture given the IQ advantage among E.Asians. But couldn’t other HBD factors play in?Presumably personality differences play a big role as well. You already mentioned conformity for example. So why would the achievement gap be a paradox unless you think it’s only about IQ?
anthrocentric climate change and a strong inclination toward primitivism.
Sometimes you have to play to the crowd.
Would I lie about my beliefs to save my peeps?
Every day and twice on Sunday.
National Socialism was the only systematic exception I know of, where leaving the religion for a secular ideology often led to higher fertility. But then again, it was a quasi-religion itself, and, promoting as it did the Gottgläubig faith, it wasn’t exactly atheistic either.
Hey Erik,
I cannot speak about non-Muslims – I simply don’t see this happening in the Muslim world. Historically, there has been plenty of ability to move across borders in Dar ul-Islam. There are people alive today that literally walked across the Sahara to make the Hajj and then went back to West Africa. One has to ask; why didn’t Muslim Africans move en masse into the Balkans before when they were freely able to wander through the Ottoman Empire?
Peace.
Anthropogenic climate change is believed or at least the possibility agnostically accepted by a number of alt-right personalities, for example Kevin MacDonald.
I don’t think the alt-right has more irrational beliefs than most other movements, especially if one considered the lunacy of leftists.
those of us that have too much intelligence Wink, wink. LOL
Along the lines of your comment, everybody is all handwringy about the left side of the curve. Hell, the left side is doing what it has always done, it is right side (the ones calling the shots) that are in failure mode.
Exactly – and it wasn’t around for that long to be observed honestly and across a broad spectrum of humanity. Now atheism is spreading fairly quickly and is projected to be the fastest growing religion (way faster than Islam) until it hits it’s own genetic collapse and then declines as a percentage overall:
http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/
Christians are projected to bleed numbers faster than anyone. I think you are onto something, Christianity will be more and more affiliated with Africa and Asia and less and less with Europe. I don’t know if that will make Europeans abandon it even faster or if they will hold onto it as a counter-culture.
Who knows, maybe this is just atheism finding its way. It’s not that old as far as being so widespread – so maybe they’ll be a huge atheist baby boom in the future. Maybe they will come up with their own pseudo-spirituality. I doubt it, but anything is possible.
Peace.
Yeah – not very intelligent, right?
“The future belongs to those who bother to show up.” – some smart dude (who possible forgot his own advice)
Peace.
Also – couldn’t help it – blast from the past:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xIQmFk1ok0
Flavor-Flav in the house!
I know you’re not one to…but if you ever accuse me of taqiyyah in the future – Im’a pimp-slap you so hard…
Because there were so many fewer of them back then, that’s why; surely you must be aware that in the 100 years since the collapse of the Ottoman empire both the total numbers of Africans and of Muslims in Africa have increased massively.
The North African countries are already filling up with sub-saharan blacks, and reportedly quite a few of the natives don’t like it at all.
Travel or, once in the new country, keeping contact with family and friends back at home, was also more difficult.
if you ever accuse me of taqiyyah in the future
You have me down, you ole wolf in sheep’s clothing.
quite a few of the natives don’t like it at all
Dang, evil whites have infected North Africans with colorism? Is there no end to the evil?
Hey G_R,
There are two points with this.
1) With non-Muslim Blacks (or Whites) – they should have permission to enter the countries in question – period. We aren’t keen on military-age non-Muslim males wandering around Muslim lands for no reason. Of course, all current international agreements should be adhered to when dealing with the issue, but – just to give you a classical viewpoint – in the school I follow, a non-Muslim male that entered Muslim territory without official permission was the property of anybody who could catch him. No joke.
2) With Muslim Blacks (or Whites) – we don’t have the same issues that Europe has because:
a. We simply don’t have the foolish welfare incentives to draw a bunch of people that want to come live off or other people’s dime. So any able-bodied Muslim (African or not) will be expected to be able provide some benefit to the community overall – even if that means hauling trash on the back of a mule or digging ditches. If they find no work, they will simply go back – that is the market at work.
b. They are expected to behave according to the Shariah and any public customs that relate from ‘urf – this is nothing foreign to them since they are Muslims – so everyone is in agreement as to most of the rules of public decorum. So drunken cat-calling or groping of women, cheating people, pick-pocketing or other nonsense behavior will be punished severely.
Keep in mind, the natural tribalism that arises in people is actually supposed to be kept in check by the Shariah. Thus when when
That’s why I simply don’t see the same thing happening.
Peace.
Oops – got cut off…
Thus when one is in a land of fellow Muslims of different background – one adheres to and honors the framework from which they derive their own safety and well-being:
“Fear your Guardian-Lord, Who created you from a single person, then created, of like nature, his mate, and from them two scattered (like seeds) countless men and women. Fear Allah, through Whom you demand your mutual (rights), and (revere) the wombs (that bore you): for Allah ever watches over you.” (4:1)
Interesting comments by an Israeli history professor who is also a best-selling author:
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2017/12/29/towards-a-global-biopolitics-a-review-of-yuval-hararis-sapiens/
atheism vs religion is a huge red herring. atheism is not nihilism.
most “New Atheists” are shitlibs. but they do believe in a grand plan and a purpose for humanity and an endgame. Which just so happen to include the triumph of shitlibbery over the entire planet, and to see all “bigots” and “hypocrites” gassed. That’s what gets them through the day.
traditional religion isn’t productive in the West, i.e. it doesn’t get people riled up intellectually. When it does, it’s just the tribal component which is masking as some deep doctrinal differences but is in reality pure tribalism (orthos vs uniates etc.)
the real divide (which is becoming tribal as well) is between liberalism, conservatism and nationalism which once was part of liberalism but now has come to be orthogonal to both.
in all times elites tried to justify their rule. but the standard of what counts as a good legitimization has grown – from brute force in pre-history to religious legitimization in the middle ages to some kind of intellectual justification (aka ideology) in modernity, the keystone of which is science. In any case, to rule you must show you’re in posession of Truth™.
today, elites purport to know what’s good for everyone through social research, fMRI research etc. Good governance is no more a question of wisdom, justice etc but of social engineering. Policies are sold to (or rather foisted upon) the public like a product would. Britain has an official Nudge Unit.
That’s truth by science. Truth by revelation is just the medieval, desert-dwelling, sheep-shagging version of that. That’s why public religious rituals always look so LARPy, like a CPGB rally.
“2. Maybe, just maybe – as John Derbyshire seems to have intuited – elite college discrimination against Asians actually serves a purpose?
At least if your goal is not fairness, or pure meritocracy, or increasing the supply of quality doctors and lawyers and engineers… but maximizing the rate of innovation.”
But if many/most elite college grads go into Government / Finance / Biglaw / Consulting / Medicine, then it doesn’t seem like elite colleges have innovation as their purpose. And given the large number of legacy admissions, they seem even less interested in selecting for merit or innovation.
Anyways, my view is that if innovation is a goal (it certainly doesn’t seem to be America’s goal right now), we should find a proxy variable to assess for that, with the understanding that certain groups will predominate over others. Or better yet: let interested people go into innovative careers, and let the market sort out their skill and competence.
LessWrong’s unpopularity with women can be explained, more simply, by its repellent qualities. I mean, if a woman hears about this thing and decides to google it, this is what she sees on the first page:
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/eliezer-schlomo-yudkowsky-lesswrong-aka-nanananabooboo-i-am-smarter-than-you.11361/
Autistic traits, lack of education and employment, My Little Pony fanfiction, screaming in capslock about evil supercomputers… Not a very attractive image, especially in female eyes.
Not only travel was more difficult. Life, back home in Africa, was much easier. Remember that those were colonial times, life in the colonies was paradise for Whites and relatively good (much better than today) for natives.
Oh…my…God…
Yeah – these guys aren’t going to be reproducing much at this rate…a little advice for them…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-tGL-buZ94Y
OT, but for those interested in the perennial India vs China comparison, one way to look at it is through the lens of structural transformation, i.e. how well an economy shifts from being primarily agricultural to primarily industrial (with some services) and then finally primarily services as a last stage. This shift can be calculated both through shares of GDP but it is more commonly done through employment.
Indian labour data has historically been very poor, but since 2016 CMIE – a private economic research institution – has been conducting their own survey and the results for 2017 is in:
https://cmie.com – just click on the main story on the front page.
Note that India added 23 million people in the over age-15 category and 15 million people dropped out of the labour force. On top of that, only 2 million jobs were created. This will not help speculation that India’s GDP growth statistics are not reliable, just as stagnating retail sales/car sales cast long shadows on Turkey’s supposed “10% growth” in the last quarter and likely 7% total growth for the year.
People should be skeptical of taking GDP data from poorer developing countries at face value. Deterioration of GDP growth data has been continuous since 2011, when China’s growth statistics started to diverge from fast-moving indicators like PMI, exports, capacity utilisation, industrial profits etc etc. Since then, both India and Turkey have massively (and artificially) boosted their GDP growth rates with new revisions. What we’re seeing now is likely a period of divergence or at the very least a very slow convergence. CEE is still growing (modestly) well, but I don’t see any Korea-like convergence stories. China is growing slower (https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2015/retrieve.php?pdfid=812) than they claim, but whatever they grow at, is done at the expense of a massively credit-fueled bubble.
All of this means that it is becoming harder to judge which countries are doing well and not. One of the few convergence success stories continues to be Vietnam, where fast-moving indicators (exports, investment growth, car sales, retail sales etc etc) are matching rapid GDP growth. Philippines is another one.
India is not one, and China itself is growing only because of massive debt, and even then their true growth remains questionable. I write this to underline how important it is not to take topline GDP growth figures at face value in developing countries without looking at fast-moving indicators and/or employment growth. It’s also a reminder that India will unlikely be following the path of East Asia and now looks set to become like a middling Latin American country. Which, given its huge population, will still make it an enormously large economy and a key global power. But not a pleasant place to live.
The comments in this thread remind me of a Jordan Peterson video I watched a while back where he discussed why he believed spirituality came about in the first place. It was basically a coping mechanism for the increasing brain power of human beings, a way to manage the existential angst that came about with the rise in intelligence.
Peterson claimed that increasing incidences of anxiety and depression were related to rising atheism/lack of spirituality, a lack of coping mechanism to regulate the increased nueroticism naturally present in human beings.
Not sure how much stock I put into being associated with the 6 communities you describe above. It seems to me that being associated with Occupy Wall Street is actually negative value added, in the same sense that majoring in women’s studies is negative value added. It’s basically a bunch of left wing fanatics railing against capitalism.
I’ve been somewhat involved in the so called New Atheist/rational skeptic movement and while I’m sure non-East Asians are more likely to gather around on a couch debating whether or not God exists, I’m not necessarily convinced that this correlates with the high end cognitive ability required to accomplish real life things. The skeptics I encountered were mostly at least above average intelligence dudes with a penchant for argumentation. I can see what you’re trying to get at, but I’m not convinced. A random nitpick, before I get to the rest of my argument. According to Wikipedia, I get about 8 million+ total Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Americans in the US. Out of a total population of 320 million, that comes out to be about 2.5%, not 4.8%. Since you broke out South Asians from the Asian category, I’m guessing you must’ve lumped in all of the other Southeast Asian groups into the Asian category. Given how long Japanese Americans have been in this country and the well known high degree of out-marriage in that population, we can even debate whether or not to exclude that group from the 2.5%. Given how minor deltas in the percentages you quoted above can alter your ratios significantly, I suspect your analysis might be somewhat off. However, all of that aside…
I don’t think you have quite the right grasp of the HBD involved. You seem to dismiss Richard Lynn’s assertion of a math/verbal split, with East Asians being lower than whites verbally but significantly higher in terms of performance IQ, but this result seems to have shown up in many places apart from the myriad of studies Lynn has performed and can potentially illuminate some facts today.
For instance, earlier you seemed to note that China’s rise in science was especially pronounced in the quantitative fields, but less so in the life sciences, social sciences, and humanities. This fact has also been noted by Simon Marginson, who notes that China’s rise in science is particularly pronounced in the fields of math, physics, chemistry, engineering, and computer science, but far less so in other fields.
This probably resolves some of the mystery surrounding Japan as well. My guess is that Japanese output is probably disproportionately concentrated in the same quantitative fields as in China, albeit they’re stronger in life sciences than China is. So there may be a number of non-quantitative fields with relatively little Japanese presence. These are probably the same ones where you noted that Chinese output significantly lagged American output as well. Furthermore, the Japanese penchant for insularity and the general lack of facility with the English language probably limits Japanese output somewhat as well in journals such as Nature, but alas such is the inevitable fact of modern day science being done in English on a global level.
But I digress. Given the East Asian math/verbal split, a lot of excess talent goes into engineering, a fact which seems to be ignored in these kinds of discussions. I don’t think it’s a trivial fact that practically every bit of consumer electronics hardware is made by an East Asian company today or contains parts mostly made in East Asia.
https://www.ft.com/content/dbb3bc26-413b-11e7-9d56-25f963e998b2
As noted by yourself in an earlier thread and as I had been pointing out as well, Europe has very little presence in technology and engineering today. It’s basically California software versus East Asian hardware, with the caveat that obviously China has its own versions of things such as Google or the likes with their BAT companies. I also find this hardware versus software dichotomy interesting in that I suspect it’s a reflection of the same math/verbal split that I’ve been alluding to above. By the same kind of reasoning, I think one thing you’ve failed to notice perhaps is that US/UK output seems to be disproportionately concentrated in just the areas where East Asians skew away from, mainly life sciences, medicine, social sciences, humanities, software, and services. It’s like wondering why Chinese Americans do so well on math competitions, but have little presence in the Spelling Bee. My guess is that much of this ultimately has to do with HBD in some form or another.
No, Derbyshire’s argument was that since Asians are a market dominant minority, best to clamp down on them to keep the peace. With the caveat of everything I just mentioned above, East Asian Americans seem to be disproportionately represented in STEM in the United States, in particular Chinese Americans. a fact which also seems to be ignored in your analyses. Chinese Americans make up 1.5% of the total population, but surely must contribute significantly more than that to US STEM, possibly by an order of magnitude. Even Raj Chetty’s limited study of NYC public high school students suggested that Asian American students had a higher per capita propensity for becoming patent holders compared to white Americans.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/innovation-income-chetty/547202/
My bad, that 4.8% includes South Asians as well. Didn’t read the numbers carefully enough.
No need to wager. We already have major longitudinal studies such as the SMPY that suggests that even a standardized test such as the SAT math administered at a relative young age can yield insights into future likelihood of accomplishment.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2016/09/smpy-in-nature.html
Who in the alternative right proper would even remotely qualify as being preeminent, given how fringe a movement this is? If we drop the “proper” condition, I guess maybe some academics like Charles Murray or the likes are somewhat well known? As far as alt-right proper goes though, i.e. blogs at Unz/Vdare/Amren/Taki/etc I get the impression that John Derbyshire seems to have many admirers here given the supposed breadth of his written output. I understand that he used to work in tech, wrote a book or two on popular math, and even wrote a novel. However these days though, his main thing seems to be warning anyone within 100 miles who’ll listen over and over again endlessly about The Most Important Fact in the World, that uh on average blacks are more violent and less intelligent relative to other ethnic groups.
Well he may indeed be right about all of that, but uh hearing it ad infinitum on Unz hardly qualifies as “innovative”.
Even if being a reader of Slate Star Codex is something you put stock in, which to me seems arbitrary since it’s just one specific blog, 2.5% of the population being East Asian versus 4% of blog readers being East Asian doesn’t seem to me to be an under-representation.
Impugning any individual seems to be a silly waste of time for an exercise in ego-boosting; the more important consideration for me is that functional belief systems can sometimes have negative externalities; its been a thought given the evidence that Mr. Karlin has also gathered in regards to liberal IQ generally being higher.
Its more hypothetical than anything, but a potential speculation from this is that individuals with seemingly “warped” interests and attitudes may actually be particularly able to contribute innovative insights: consider for example, that Newton was interested in occultism and alchemy or that Da Vinci’s awareness of anatomy sourced from a seemingly ghoulish fascination with dissecting corpses.
I think it is interesting to consider how a number of nonfunctional belief systems, for example alchemy, would nonetheless provide an useful basis for actual revelations.
I admit that while I had an interest in LW writings when I was younger and certainly found some ideas such as Bayesian decisonmaking worthwhile, it was really hard to want to be part of the community simply because Yudkowsky came pretty hard to me as a cult leader(and this was before any of the more famous quotes).
Like many cult leaders, he could be interesting and have insights, but I didn’t want to stay too long and get infected by the crazy, so it felt.
Oh, definitely not. But one could argue that’s pretty damning with faint praise.
The contradictions and insanity that make up modern leftism is right up there with the Salem witch trails.
Yup. Legacy admissions is about the worst thing you can do if your end goal is to “maximize innovation”. It’s basically affirmative action for wealthy, somewhat above average whites, i.e. the Jared Kushers of the country.
Forget about comparing different countries. Just look at the US. What percent of people working in STEM, i.e. top science labs, top tech companies in the Bay Area in technical roles, etc. are from different ethnic groups? My guess is that Chinese Americans, depending on field, are probably the 2nd most over-represented group behind Jewish Americans, given that Chinese Americans only make up 1.5% of the US population. (I know that immigration skews the analysis in my favor somewhat, but just follow along for the moment. And yes, I’m aware that in certain fields Indian Americans have a higher degree of over-representation.)
I’ve noticed that while Chinese Americans outnumber Korean Americans by 2.5x or so, their per capita performance relative to Korean Americans seems to be decently higher than that. Most Asians in tech in the Bay Area for instance are Chinese or Indians. There are relatively few Koreans. So in a sense, even the aggregate East Asian American category understates Chinese American performance.
A couple of great examples of Harvard accepting the right kinds of people. Two uh Chinese American immigrant Tiger Cubs, both of whom placed in the top 3 in the old Intel Science Talent Search, and majored in Chemistry at Harvard undergrad. In particular, Feng Zhang is most likely the 3rd person if a trio were to awarded the Nobel prize for CRISPR, along with Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier.
https://gt.foreignpolicy.com/2017/profile/david-liu-and-feng-zhang?1fea5800af=
Well maybe to some extent, but uh people in those days believed in a ton of crazy shit, so there’s always that to take into consideration. More generally though, this romantic idea of “salon demographics”, i.e. who’s more likely to attend a talk by Ray Kurzweil about the future of transhumanism and the Singularity, seems to me to be somewhat misguided. Plenty of serious people working in hard STEM fields have had some not particularly nice things to say about Kurzweil. 🙂
IMO, innovation isn’t dreaming about mind uploading and nanobots patrolling throughout your bloodstream and getting high. It’s about possessing some necessary threshold for cognitive talent, i.e. SMPY, and then having the opportunity, passion, and drive to see it through. If you want to see who’s contributing to American innovation, why not just look at who are the people working in the top science labs in this country, at the top tech companies, etc, etc. Were Feng Zhangs and David Lius getting high on Ectasy at Burning Man and uh discovering their spirit animals, etc etc.
“Abrahamic faiths are in the dustbin”
Actually, Christianity has reinvented itself, as it always
has in the past, in the form that has been described as “Christianity
for the intellectuals, and is now gaining converts throughout
the world probably at the same rate as the original brand
of Christianity did in the Roman Empire.
I’m referring to “A Course in Miracles” (1976) and the sequel,
“A Course of Love” (2001). The first, written in beautiful iambic
pentameter, weighs in at about 1250 pages, and the second at 675
pages. The treatises are, obviously, not for the faint of heart. Both
have been “received” through inner dictation. Both are university-
level courses, and the first one actually has 365 experiential lessons.
“A Course in Miracles” so far has been translated meticulously into
over 25 languages. Countless study groups are now in existence. In
the U.S. at least they are associated typically with the Catholic parishes
although New Thought people, e.g., Unity Church near Kansas City,
are also very interested.
What the Courses teach cannot be easily summarized but they both
describe the nature of reality, the meaning of history, and what to
expect in the future. What they both emphasize is the transcendence
of the ego and that nothing in life is as important as the quality of our
relationships. The true test of life is not the wealth, fame or power
but whether your life abounds in miracles, synchronistic events, and
light-heartedness. Humans are described as divine beings having a
human experience. This was already presaged by Stewart Brand as
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” – the famous opening
sentence of the 1968 Whole Earth Catalog. To me as a member of the
Sixties Generation that sentence was the most striking tenet of the ’60s.
We create our reality, but not on the ego level. Therefore there is no one
to blame. Your concept of God is dependent on your level of consciousness.
Most people are not evolved enough to understand God except on a fairly
primitive level as basically the King of the Universe. However, the Courses
describe God as closer to our collective consciousness at the level of the
Higher Self. One way to express it is to say that only 1% of us exists in the
world of space and time while 99% of us is outside the Universe. Therefore
the key question in life is, “Where is the rest of me?”
An addendum: A striking fact about the Sixties
(roughly 1965-’73 culturally speaking) was that it
was accompanied by a sudden loss of interest in
science (esp. physical sciences) in the West. For
example, at UC Berkeley scientists were beginning
to be described as the “whores in the service of the
military-industrial complex. ” In the ’80s in the U.S.
there was a mass exodus of white students from STEM
and into banking, finance, economics, and consulting.
Today there is growing hostility toward Silicon Valley:
software engineers are being described as drug pushers
whose goal is to induce a dopamine high through frequent
use of social media.
As a scientist I struggled with the question of why our (white)
students are no longer enthusiastic about science. One answer
is provided by the famous paper published by Charles Tart in
1972 in Science journal. Tart is a transpersonal psychologist
now retired from UC Davis, famous for his study of altered states
of consciousness. His treatise, On Being Stoned (1971), is a classic
in the field. His 1972 paper is entitled, “States of Consciousness
and State-Specific Sciences.” Basically it claims that altered states
of consciousness produce their own reality which is different from
ordinary consensus reality. For instance, synchronistic phenomena
(originally explored by Carl Jung) intensify, wounds and illnesses
heal much faster, etc.
From this point of view science is a worthy pursuit but it can only give us
a shallow view of reality, namely how reality behaves to someone
operating on the ego level, i.e., in a prosaic ordinary state of consciousness.
Science tells us how the illusion (or camouflage) is constructed but not
how to pierce through the illusion. If the Universe is an elaborate video
game, then all that scientists can tell us is how the video game is developed.
Today (mostly) white people find this inadequate – more and more they
want to pierce through the veil of illusion and achieve states of consciousness, individual and collective, in which the limitations of the laws of physics are
transcended by higher laws. In other words, scientists are no longer admired
because science is viewed as the “old outdated stuff,” something that belongs
to the pre-1960s era, and people now want to move on to the new stuff and
operate on a higher level of reality.
Which belief system would, in your mind, qualify as having the least drag on innovation? I don’t think the alt-right is doing worse than others on the soberness of its views (especially given that your examples are not even universally accepted within the alt-right – neither primitivism nor ACC denial are universal within the movement, if one can even call it a movement), in fact, as Talha mentioned, the problem might be a relative lack of spiritualism and obscurantism (something which most readers here seem to disagree with).
The grandson of WW2 Hungarian Regent Horthy is a convert to Islam, but he joined (and I think is actually some kind of spiritual leader of) a seemingly heterodox group called Subud. The group is not explicitly Muslim, though the founder was, and I think Islam is one of the recommended religions for its members.
I hope that my posts don’t leave the impression
that I’m disparaging science. On the contrary,
Quantum Field Theory, for example, in the form of Quantum
Electrodynamics or Quantum Chromodynamics, is one of
the most beautiful creations of the human mind. It takes
many years of grad school to appreciate that level of beauty.
However, science is associated with Modernity, incl. WW I
and WW II. Science may be attractive to societies that are
still largely pre-modern but to many people in the West
Modernity is something to go beyond (and I’m not a big fan
of Postmodernity either). Many are looking for something better
than science, particularly as science itself, having found the low-
hanging fruit, is starting to hit a brick wall, esp. in fundamental
physics.
Any recommendations on what we East Asians can do to make our societies more creative? In particular asking for China.
Actually enjoyed your input, thanks. I do hope a Christianity with a seriously revived spiritual core comes back in play.
Peace.
Anatoly, did you control for non-americans in online polls?
The latest SSC poll, and if I recall correctly, the LW ones as well, had categories for country of origin and if you don’t control for it than europeans and people from other Anglophone countries will give jews and whites a boost over blacks and hispanics.
Not that I doubt that blacks and hispanics are underrepresented, but at least on the SSC subreddit there seem to be lots of europeans, which may explain why it is more balanced on political topics.
Spirituality and obscurantism may indeed play a part; specifically, however, I would argue that maximal innovation comes from distributed but secure power centers that allows for various ideas to flourish and a certain class of “bored” individuals who are given leeway to explore. In Europe, this would most exhibit itself during the Renaissance when scholars and thinkers would be able to advance various ideas, and enough distance that if someone fell out of favor somewhere, then he would simply flee to another country or patron and practice his work there, producing a body of information. You see this with John Dee or Casanova, and in the various seemingly silly manuscripts from leeching to sympathetic magic to “bath healing” – but it allowed ideas to develop without being crushed either by government or demotic means. Arguably the same dynamic was during the Hundred Schools period of China, the origin of Confucianism and really the most productive period of Chinese philosophy.
To have something like that in the modern world would mean many more venture capitalists who are capable of funding various projects independent of outside pressure, but unfortunately at the moment, its not really like Richard Spencer can get funded by a major patron and go to Orania to setup a government by his principles, allowing it to be independently tested by time for success.
… that uh on average blacks are more violent and less intelligent relative to other ethnic groups.
What is the proper response to this information is the most prominent quandary for American representative democracy and by extension for the American nation. It is existential.
Well he may indeed be right about all of that, but uh hearing it ad infinitum on Unz hardly qualifies as “innovative”.
Some appear to be gratified by being a one-note Nellie on a taboo subject. Some may be hoping that if it is repeated enough times, an “innovative” person will notice and offer a practical solution.
There is a small body of work on this within China already and its worth looking into:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jocb.20/abstract
Beyond that, centralized censorship is never great for creativity and a decreased aversion to risk taking will help in my speculation. That and the current model of science in Chinese universities, and overall mentality suffers from “pramaticism” which seeks to have concrete, typically marketable results within a reasonable timeframe. This promotes applied science but at the cost of basic science – something which is also noted by corporate-funded research in general, which tended toward that(though with exceptions, Bell Lab has had incredible innovations).
China’s growth is still powered by robust productivity growth.
I think you’re missing the point that “weird, crazy ideas” actually can be immensely useful. And why not? Such seemingly strange ideas and even when plainly wrong, can nonetheless produce useful information; alchemy is a star example of this, where the goal of turning lead into gold was impossible beyond any available to the practitioners, but the systemic study and recording of results nonetheless led to the creation of the still and other useful equipment.
I think you’re underestimating the positive externalities in having “far out” belief systems that nonetheless can lead to opening avenues of thought. This is probably one of the greatest possibilities, too, of machine learning as I’m sure that Mr. Karlin has seen: unconstrained by the human mind, computers can sometimes come up with solutions to a problem domain that humans do not contemplate(such as Stanford’s helicopter flying upside down or the Go solutions by Google’s AlphaGo).
Essentially, when tackling the “unknown unknowns”, sometimes the willingness to stumble in the dark to chase unicorns might be pretty useful after all.
Hey reiner Tor,
Very interesting. Yes, there are plenty of Sufi teachers that will take on students of various backgrounds without restriction and teach them general spiritual practices like meditation, character-building, etc. – you definitely find more of these in non-Muslim lands. People like myself are more comfortable with something within the normative framework and – importantly – a traditional chain of teachers linking things all the way back; like this chain of Shaykh Muhammad Yaqoubi:
http://damas.nur.nu/148/pages/tasawwuf/shadhili/silsila
He also has quite a few students of Western backgrounds, but I think he expects one to be a Muslim before taking them as an initiate.
Peace.
… specifically, however, I would argue that maximal innovation comes from distributed but secure power centers that allows for various ideas to flourish and a certain class of “bored” individuals who are given leeway to explore.
How is the innovation in ideology or political theory connected to technological innovation? That is, are they separate processes or are they integral parts and just different facets of some general freedom to innovate? Is a lower level of technological innovation in some modern countries predicted by lack of freedom to innovate ideologically and politically?
A nation-state based upon racial or ethnic factors is not, of course, innovative. The innovation seems to be the idea (currently in ascendency in the US and some European countries) that the concept of the nation-state is flawed and should be disposed of.
I would argue yes, although also giving consideration to reduced science input due to acquisition of low-hanging fruit. But for example, once the political situation becomes unviable to pursue nuclear research, it becomes very difficult to further the advancement of nuclear power plants. I think that some of the most innovative times in US history, the time of Edison and Telsa, was also the era of Oneida cults and secret societies.
I don’t have a high regard for Spencer’s ideas or their potential for success, but it is still innovative in the sense that it is a modern implementation and uses a different technological context to implement his ideas, so now he has genetic testing to practice one-drop rules and centralized methods to find and send societal detritus such as myself into optimized wood chippers. Perhaps it’ll work in ways that previous attempts could not, and be a shining beacon of progress to the world.
At any rate, I think that he should be allowed to run his experiment. As they say, no effort is worthless – it can always held up as a bad example for others to mock in the future.
Hey Daniel Chieh,
Totally agree here – I’m for voting for these guys’ United States of White Awesomeness to show us browns how its done!!!
I think they should figure out 5 contiguous states to start with – preferably those that already have a large majority of Whites and reasonable resources and go to town! I would totally vote for it if it came up in a national referendum.
Peace.
Thank you.
And I have a great deal of respect for Sufism.
Don’t know if you’ve come across Cornell Prof. Hugh Gauch’s work on the Scientific Method, but he has a very interesting chapter on the limits of science. Under “Science’s Power Limits” he starts off pretty early by saying:
“Several limitations of science are rather obvious and hence are not controversial. The most obvious limitation is that scientists will never observe, know, and explain everything about even science’s own domain, the physical world. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Godel’s theorem and chaos theory set fundamental limits.”
Scientific Method in Brief
Your mention of a video game reminds me of a very recent lecture by my teacher who made the same analogy. The spirit/soul is “plugged” into the material universe, much like a player’s avatar (even in the 21st century we can’t escape religious terms). It is just a really, really good version of virtual reality.
If you get a chance, and have the time – this might interest you since you seem to come from a scientific background and mention quantum theory. It is an analysis of the theological positions of the Ash’ari school (as championed by Imam Ghazali [ra] who was both a theologian and a Sufi) regarding causality, determinism and ontological reality itself in comparison to the positions made by Copenhagen Interpretation of sub-atomic phenomena:
https://www.ghazali.org/articles/harding-V10N2-Summer-93.pdf
Peace.
Peace.
Hey Archimedes,
Jordan Peterson is definitely a man who should get more attention these days. He’s caught the attention of many Muslims who are trying to push back on the Left-liberal nonsense creeping into our community*. If I remember correctly, he has been invited by a few campus Muslim groups to speak.
As to his interpretation of spirituality. I get where he is coming from, but to me it looks like one is putting the cart before the horse. One is extrapolating the metaphysical from the physical while trying to stay within the physical. It doesn’t seem to work.
So if the spirit and spirituality are basically some kind of a meta-understanding/abstraction of human cognition, you are still sealed within the machine. You aren’t saying the “spirit” or “soul” is real in its essence, it’s just a nice way to define a common identity that is the aggregate of the experiences, memories, desires, etc. of a chemical machine that is really just the end results of the collaborative efforts of millions of highly specified cell colonies aka “you”. I find that kind of spirituality hard to grasp because it seems like playing around and never really getting to the crux of the matter; does the spirit have an ontological reality or not? How can you have spirituality when its locus, the spirit, is just a figment of one’s imagination?
If it has a reality, then the rise in anxiety and depression – being the canaries in the coal mine – are signals that it needs some kind of maintenance or attention, the lack of which will naturally lead the chemical machine it is driving to start malfunctioning.
Peace.
*Note: We had our first conversation with our young son about what “gay” means since he heard it, but didn’t know. We simply told him it is when a man is attracted to another man and wants to live with him like how mama and baba are together. His natural reaction? “Eeeewww!”
Asians are soulless ant people, more news at 11.
Even blacks have a least produced some great music and entertainers. Asians? In all the decades that Chinese or Indians have been in the UK or America, what of cultural note have they produced? Nothing.
I don’t know about Chinese or Indians in the UK or US, but Japanese in Japan have produced things like manga, or a number of influential movies (often remade in Hollywood, like the horror movie Ring), and similar cultural content. I wouldn’t say the Japanese didn’t produce cultural content at all.
“why didn’t Muslim Africans move en masse into the Balkans before when they were freely able to wander through the Ottoman Empire?” historically Subsaharan Africans made up very small percentage of the world population. In each of the civilizational centers in the Near East, South Asia, East Asia, Europe and Meso America there where vastly more people than in all of Subsaharan Africa. So it is now the first time in human history since thousands of years that Subsaharan Africans form a significant share of the world population.
I have grave doubts about the figures you present for Occupy especially as it relates to Jews, they were surely “over represented” to use your fascist nomenclature. This incredible
oversight, with no explanatory footnote, makes me doubt the
entire table and your reductionist takeaway.
That is also a valid point. I guess we’ll have to see how this plays out. I’m not worried about it for the reasons I outlined. The Muslim world doesn’t have the same policies as Europe so projecting Europe’s issues onto the Muslim world just doesn’t work.
Peace.
What are you on about? Can you read?
1. I don’t give a figure for Jews in OWS.
2. Because the source (which I linked to in all cases) didn’t have Jews as a demographic group.