I'd kill for a @kunley_drukpa thread on "What scientists say Africa would look like if Lynn's data were accurate"
This is a funny argument. It misses the fact that you'd also have a small number of 100 IQ kleptocrats just competent enough to bring in oil and gas majors and then rug them once a cycle, while keeping the masses in squalor. Hey, wait a minute...
Guys who attempt this reductio ad absurdum have clearly never lived in Africa. There are a dozen guys within ten blocks of our house who live in *perpetual stupor*. Just...sitting on the ground and staring...for years.
Now, might the real number be closer to 70 than to 59? Of course. I'd bet on it. But these guys aren't mad about the difference between 59 and 70, they just want the topic to...go...away.
People so often misrepresent Lynn's data that I thought it would be worth checking the actual source for Swann's claim. Let's check Lynn's latest (2012) compilation of estimates. Oh, look, Equatorial Guinea estimated at 69, not 59 🙄
In addition to getting the national estimate wrong, Swann also acts like Lynn was unaware of Equatorial Guinea's large positive GDP residual. Actually, Lynn devoted entire chapters to these residuals
Lynn knew his lit reviews were imperfect and fragmentary, which is why they took up entire books. Anyone who cared to read them would learn that Lynn's estimates accord quite well with other indices of human development (here, Lynn 2012):
Weird week. Never would have imagined that a couple of midsized normie accounts would be inviting exegesis of Bryan Pesta admixture regressions and Richard Lynn IQ appendices. Maybe next week JoJoFromJerz will ask about Gray Wolf fixation index
This is another funny "gotcha". When a Census worker fails to survey a block in Camden, NJ, do they just say "Oh well!" & then it's anybody's guess as to whether that block might be full of hedge fund managers instead of people very like their neighbors?
The Boer's ability to stand up to the British makes sense when you meet proper South African dutchmen. In the US, survivalism/DIY/prepper guys come across as LARPers; there's that gleam in the eye as they wait for your reaction to hearing that they retread their own tires. But...
..in the African dutchman you get this childish diffidence paired with Scandinavian literalness. Guy will talk about building his own house the way you talk about going to the store for bananas. "Sure I make my own knives, nothing fancy, but I had those leaf springs lying around"
And Saffas of British descent talk about them the way you might talk about the Borg, kind of a grudging awe. "Yeah, that town was all right once the Dutch boys showed up, you know they'll just do their own civils, put in their own sewerage and so on..."
A sample of white Rhodesians in the 1960s suggested a mean IQ of 108. From personal experience in that part of the world, I find this believable. South Africans laugh when I tell them that Saffas are the most impressive whites I've met anywhere.
The first thing you notice in English southern Africa is the physical robustness of the whites. The second thing you notice is the entrepreneurial spirit. In Rhodesia, maybe it was selection from among competent and bellicose Scots.
Pakistanis are not weird, Europeans are weird. Australian aboriginals ritually gang rape prepubescent girls, 30% of Africans in convenience surveys *admit* to having raped, Amerindians set records for child pregnancies, Gazan civilians came through the fences to join the raping
Bus just disgorged 50 "inner city" youth onto quiet exurb playground, 17yos now brachiating over play equipment, yuppie parents scattering with toddlers like leaves before a sudden wind
This is the noise from 110 yards away
We are waiting for 20-something scholar to finish using the swing as some sort of surfboard