We need the hotel workers and farmers!
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Well, no one's attacking 'em, so there's no need to play defense.
I don't like identity games. People are people. If someone was like "All white people are the same and all they care about is money and control," I'd be like "No, man. Very wrong."
Mate, I agree with you on 95% of what I've read in this topic, but I need to disagree here.
People aren't just people. There are genetic differences between ethnic groups that contribute to things like the IQ disparity (if you want a laugh, look up Bantu City Diaries on YouTube and watch the African IQ video - it's illuminating).
On top of that, the culture someone grows up in shapes their adult brain quite strongly, and some cultures are inferior stock for raising civilizationally-minded humans. You should understand that one implicitly, since I see you having the same arguments with the godbotherers around here that I do, and they simply lack the capacity to change course as this point, so I won't bring up anything else here.
Thirdly, on the subject of culture again, everyone BUT western whites is intensely, observably tribalistic. Look at the somali scum in Minnesota and Maine, for example, or the various jew enclaves around the country, or black ghettos, or the international jeet tsunami, or etc. The overwhelming majority of these groups will act first and foremost preferentially to their ingroup (like how the Frey guy got elected Minneapolis mayor by campaigning on somali blood feuds...in fucking somalia, or how FedEx hired a jeet CEO, and suddenly after they get a $2.2 billion contract, they fire Americans and apply for thousand of H1B jeets, etc.), secondarily to the detriment of the outgroup, and never to the general benefit of society unless it affects them personally.
People are not "just people". There's gacha star rarities to people, and there's a reason everyone wants to live in six star white countries amongst six star white people.
See, here's the thing. IQ tests are a pretty good measure of working memory, spatial reasoning, quantitative reasoning, acquired knowledge, and pattern recognition.
In other words, what IQ measures is basically: how good you can become at chess. All of these are chess skills. You could substitute ELO for IQ and you'd have a pretty tight correlation.
IQ, like ELO, is completely mute on whether you can competently raise children, show up on time to do your job, make ethical decisions, maintain friendships, create beautiful things - you know, everything that actually matters in life. It's pretty much just chess. You know what a high IQ got for Bobby Fischer? A lifetime of misery and ostracism, and it's hard to even argue that he put much good into the world.
Every group of people has an inherited tendency to be intensely, observably tribalistic. That's true whether we're talking about conservatives or metalheads or Buddhists or Guelphs or Polynesians.
If you're associating tribalism with primitivism: I agree. I think it's something that's important to rise past. To be able to recognize that your caveman brain is yelling "my tribe good, their tribe danger," and at the same time say to it "yeah, but you're not a caveman, are you."
You're contradicting yourself here, though. All of the things you describe as "mattering in life" (and though it pains me to leave a lion's eye unpoked, I won't start that argument) DO very, very strongly correlate to IQ. Look me in the eye and tell me seriously that acquired knowledge, pattern recognition, quantitative reasoning, and working memory aren't critical parts of making and keeping friends, or effective child resting, or good and ethical decision making, or good job performance, and I'll call you a liar.
The lack of these skills and traits correlates nearly one to one to severe difficulties with ADLs, common social responsibilities, and holding down a job, and no one ever said "man, Derek such a shit person, he remembers all his son's event dates, plays baseball with Jim, and is generally knowledgeable".
I mean, I 100% agree with you, in the theoretical model that's equivalent to the spherical homogenous cow in a vacuum approximation. But the thing is, we don't live there. We live in the real world, where two thirds of greater of the entire human race is firmly on the ape side of the "rising ape meets falling angel" scale of cognitive development. You and I may say "hush, brain, we no unga bunga today", but most people you meet are, in essence or in fact, still cavemen. This is ESPECIALLY true of low-IQ people, who often fundamentally lack the capability of rising above caveman brain.
And, like it or not, the decendents of the peoples of the Occidents faced the environmental pressures that selected for higher IQs and the traits that associate with effective society building. The retards and socially maladaptive didn't survive the winters, and were bred out of that gene stock. And as those people advanced and left the harsh homelands, they were able to put those traits to use building societies. Compare that to the peoples who never left Africa or who settled onto tropical islands. When food grows year round and falls out of trees, and the weather is never unsurvivable, there's no pressure outside of not being eaten by tigers. No pressure to evolve anything more than stronger arms and faster legs. And you can see this reflected in the peoples at large in the world today.
You can't seriously try to make the point that higher average IQs don't positively correlate to all the "things that matter" unless you're willing to argue that mudhuts and tribal warfare are just as conducive to these things that matter as highrises and indoor plumbing.
You can certainly create edge cases where they matter. But for the most part, all those things are about consistency. Simple principles get them done - principles that a 70-IQ person can internalize just fine. "Keep the kid on a schedule and drive him to school." "Call your friends at least once a week." "Show up to work at 8:00, fed and rested and ready to go." That kind of thing.
It doesn't take any special intellectual skills to do that; and in fact, people with high IQs are often considerably worse at those things. They get too bored with schedules. They sleep through classes because they were up all night writing code. Their wife asks them if they and the kid ate dinner and they say "Oh, shit, I was distracted." Life is harder for them, as evidenced by the fact that high IQ is strongly positively correlated with alcoholism.
This is one of the weirder racist arguments. Basically "I have evolved to a higher plane of consciousness than a nigger, and therefore I must behave exactly as a nigger does."
I'm no Christian, but one of my favorite Jesus quotes is "by your fruits you will know them." If two people act identically, who really gives a shit about the internal machinery? They're functionally the same person.
Sociological studies consistently show that the Amish are the happiest people in America. Highrises and freeways are nightmares, man. Cramming people in vertically is not a good way to work or live. Indoor plumbing is nice, but wells and outhouses are just fine, too.
Another fun fact: in colonial America, there are hundreds of reports of Europeans leaving their towns and going to live with the Natives, because it was simply a better way of life. There are almost no reports of the opposite happening.
At the time when the British Empire was most proud of its civilization, its air and water were literally poison. Hunger was endemic, people were dying of communicable disease, and life was so goddamn bleak that by the 18th century London's streets were littered with passed-out gin drinkers who would rather fucking drink themselves to death than have to live in that civilization.
Yeah, I think those high-IQ British engineers may have entirely missed the things that actually matter in life.