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Wilfred Reilly Profile picture
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23 Oct, 4 tweets, 1 min read
One of the most enduring bad ideas in social science is that any large differences in performance (income, SAT scores) between groups have to be due to either racism or genetics.

There are many potential variables out here, gang. How OLD are the people we're talking about?
(2) When you think about it, the idea massive average differences in culture and training wouldn't much affect (say) IQ - which seems to be the default position on left and hard right - has to be one of the oddest things large groups of smart people have ever claimed to believe.
(3) Re a few DMs: a common hard-hereditarian position - see Nisbett (2005) reviewing Jensen (1978 on) -is that education and training don't much affect IQ.

This seems simply bizarre to me, since good schools literally teach the answers TO the questions that appear on IQ tests.
(4) My focus in the OP wasn't ON IQ, but it is obvious at some level that cultural/environmental factors affect this trait like most others.

The entire world got ~18 points smarter over the past century, and this is not seriously disputed by anyone...en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_eff…

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Wilfred Reilly Profile picture
20 Oct
Serious question: why IS gender dysphoria the only major mental condition which is treated by telling the patient that what they believe is correct?
(2) I obviously have a starting position here, and am lazily asking on social rather than cramming through 12 queued JSTOR articles on affirmation v. "watchful waiting" - but I'm not trolling: why ISN'T this something we do with anorexics?
(3) As re the primary responses: first, GD IS currently considered to be a mental condition. Here's the DSM-5 description (psychiatry.org/patients-famil…). The note that this is only true if the condition causes distress seems to have been added recently, likely for political reasons.
Read 4 tweets
Wilfred Reilly Profile picture
19 Oct
The fact that the Founders of the first large modern democracy had slaves, in an era when ~all rich men of all colors had slaves or serfs, does not mean that founding the first large modern democracy was bad.
(2) This sort of cross-generational moral comparison could me used to de-legitimatize literally any set of heroes.

JFK and MLK were meat-eating homophobes with a...very male view of adultery. Should all of THEIR statutes come down, inside 20 years?
(3) For that matter, how does this work with the Crazy Horse statute?

By our standards TODAY, the (legitimately) great man was almost certainly a rapist, murderer/war criminal, home invader, and slaver if not slave trader. Tear it down or nah?
Read 4 tweets
Wilfred Reilly Profile picture
14 Oct
From a theoretical perspective, it is very difficult to coherently explain how 7-8 of the ten richest groups in an "institutionally racist" society are non-white.
(2) In fact, it looks like EVERY Asian and West African group - including some long-resident groups that have experienced racism (Chinese Americans) and some pretty obviously Black groups (Nigerian Americans) - 'beats' the white income average...en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_e…
(3) There's also a huge amount of variance just inside the "Whites" category.

While this is often - intentionally? - just ignored, white group incomes range from $101,000 for Australian Americans and likely around that level for Jews down to $38,000 for Appalachians. Racism?
Read 5 tweets
Wilfred Reilly Profile picture
11 Oct
Thomas Sowell's "The Vision of the Anointed" was one of the most prescient books of our time.
(2) Basically, the idea of the book is that the combination of population clustering - IIRC, the OG was an early reader of the Putnam essays that became "The Big Sort" - and targeted radical takeover of specific fields is creating a dangerously out-of-touch and often wrong elite.
(3) A NATIONAL cadre that shares certain characteristics - sheltered, urban, coastal/Great Lakes, low-upper class, liberal or Con-Inc, Ivy (maaaaybe Big 10) - sees itself as having unique and novel knowledge that qualifies members to lead and radically change the country.

But..
Read 10 tweets
Wilfred Reilly Profile picture
8 Oct
As re "privileges," two facts from TABOO: Black Americans make up 25% of police shooting victims, but get ~80% of national media coverage of this problem and 10-20% of all victims of Black/white inter-racial crime - but get ~80% of national media coverage of THIS problem.
(2) This isn't hypothetical trash talking. A roughly 25% estimate for ID'd Black victims of cop shootings appears here: washingtonpost.com/graphics/inves….

While serious inter-race crime is VERY rare, a breakdown that puts violent B/W crime at ~90% B-o-W is here bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pd
(3) The other data mentioned appear in this^ book: amazon.com/Taboo-Facts-Ca….

Horn-tooting aside, you can do a very basic test of this simply by running a Google/Lexis search for something like "police shooting" and seeing how many cases involving members of each group return.
Read 4 tweets
Wilfred Reilly Profile picture
2 Oct
Something pointed out by serious people ranging literally from Tim Wise to Charles Murray is that 50% of competitors within any system will finish below average.

This has massive, obvious implications for all silly plans like "free college for all."
(2) Yes, yes - below the MEDIAN average.

Mean, median, and mode are all "the average."
(3) A lot of silly responses here. The point is that one of the major stated purposes of college ("majors," etc) is to prepare people for the ~20% of jobs ("Engineer") that require a college degree. "All in" proposals to provide 'elite' training make no sense.
Read 4 tweets

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