That whole myth about hunter-gatherers being peaceful and non-violent probably got its start because hunter-gatherers tend not to be as good at organized warfare as the Germans.
Homicide is an act of disorganized impulsive passion; warfare is an act of organized dispassion; the two are inverse of each other. Thus we see the highest homicide rates in the world’s least developed countries, and the lowest rates in its most developed countries.
Note that it is not an absolutely perfect correlation; many Latin American or Caribbean countries have higher homicide rates than even less-developed countries in Africa, but broadly speaking, the pinks and reds are poorer than the blues. (Russia excepted, ‘cuz Russia.)
Also, as you may recall:
Share of violent deaths, non-state societies vs. state societies
Countries involved in the world’s biggest wars:
WWI:
Nuclear stockpiles or programs by country:
(South Africa used to have nukes, but they got rid of them before the end of Apartheid.)
Here’s another graph that makes the size of the arsenals clear:
To be fair, it’s more “One guy with a rocket-building hobby” than a real space program, but I understand where he’s coming from. Rockets are cool.
The point of all of these maps and graphs is that homicide rates tend to be highest, both today and throughout history, in the places with the lowest levels of social organization/complexity.
Even in our own society, convicted criminals are overwhelmingly lacking in the ability to handle complexity. It looks like they aren’t really all that much more retarded (note: PDF) than the general population (the truly intellectually impaired are often pretty highly supervised and lack the ability to execute many crimes, but are often victims of violence,) but they are drawn disproportionately from the dumber half.
“Not retarded per se. My personal experience is most criminals stopped developing emotionally at about 3 or 4. They live life for the moment, think only of themselves, have no impulse control, can’t control their emotions, throw temper tantrums when they don’t get their way, can’t think past the next 10 minutes, don’t understand consequence, etc……. They are basically little children in adult bodies. Of course, most 3 or 4 year olds are better behaved than the average criminal, but you get the point.”
“I found that better than 90% of them were functionally illiterate, so when they say reading is fundamental, they aren’t kidding!”
“With the advent of welfare, it became profitable to squirt out children.It relegated men to the status of semen injectors. No men, no fathering. down the spiral 40 odd years and we’ve got multiple generations of female children “raising” children.
The results aren’t retarded, they are more like Comanches or Lakota, they have regressed several thousand years.
It is painful to watch good officers try to “reach” these kids. Watching with an unsympathetic eye, it is plain that most of these kids don’t even understand what the officers are talking about.
That’s the brutal truth that no one wants to face. These kids aren’t just lost-they are damned in our society.”
Recall our discussion back in Two Kinds of Dumb–just because someone has a low IQ, doesn’t mean they are retarded. But anyone who is illiterate (in our society) with the emotional maturity of a 3 or 4 your old is not very bright or capable of thinking through the results of their own actions.
The art of killing large numbers of people, by contrast, requires organization. One guy with a pointy stick might kill a few dozen guys who don’t have pointy sticks, but one guy who convince a thousand other guys to stand next to you with their pointy sticks, and you get this:
The Romans didn’t conquer an empire by poking barbarians with pointy sticks; they did it by organizing themselves into an unstoppable war machine.
Armies do not generally fund themselves; they depend upon a vast support structure producing weapons, food, transportation, shelter, technology, etc. The bigger the army and more advanced the weaponry, the bigger the support structure has to be. Nukes take far more people to produce than pointy sticks, from the farmers making the food to feed the scientists working out the details to the structural engineers building the research labs to the guys building the rockets or planes to drop the bombs.
Complex organization requires large numbers of people working in close proximity without punching each other; it requires that people be able to suppress their own personal desires in pursuit of the group goal. All of this requires being less violent, less impulsive, and less inclined toward murdering each other.
Worldwide distribution of B006, (from Yotova et al. “An X-Linked Haplotype of Neandertal Origin Is Present Among All Non-African Populations,” Mol. Biol. Evol. 28 (7), 2011).SNP PCA from Skoglund & Jakobsson’s “Archaic Human Ancestry in East Asia” (2011)
(Please note that Africans do not have chimpanzee admixture, despite the labeling on the graph–no human group has chimp admixture, because chimps and humans have different #s of chromosomes, so even if you could get a successful cross, the resulting child would be infertile, like a mule. I assume the point of the chimp node is just to represent that which has neither Neanderthal nor Denisovan admixture, though of course there is the possibility of some other form of archaic hominin admixture in Africans.)
So, Native Americans appear to have a ton of Neanderthal DNA. (Relatively speaking.)
Possibilities:
It’s all measurement error/convergent evolution/something else other than archaic admixture.
As much as I hate to say it, I still consider this very likely. There is just a ton of stuff that we don’t about the Americas–like how and when people first got here. I’m sticking here with what I think are the most scientifically-supported theories, but a lot of this is still quite disputed. In particular, all of this genetic admixture business is still kind of speculative, and when people start talking about finding admixture in the admixture, either life is totally awesome, or we’re trying too hard.
2. Survival at the Fringes theory
A lot of people seem to look at this data and respond with something like, “But Neanderthals are from Europe, not America!” But this is not a big issue; the Indians are descended from people who passed through Neanderthal-inhabited regions (the Middle East), just like everyone else with Neanderthal DNA. The migration to the Americas took place long after they acquired Neanderthal admixture.
But this doesn’t explain why they have so much of it.
My “concentration on the edge” theory states that when one population is displaced by another population, you end up with a “fringe” of the original population’s traits. Sometimes this fringe results in isolated groups, as the invading population completely surrounds or cuts off a remnant population from their former range.
The Ainu, for example, resemble certain other Oceanin groups, but not their neighbors, the Japanese. I’m speculating here, so don’t take my word for it.
But I have a much better case with the distribution of red hair:
(So far I have found nothing explaining that dot over in Russia.)
Red hair is highly associated with the so-called Celtic fringe. It looks like it’s highly concentrated in Wales, Scotland, and parts of Ireland, but since I know a little history, and I know these aren’t areas of concentration, but just the areas that managed to escape being displaced by Anglo-Saxon invaders, just by virtue of being further away from the south-east coast of Britain.
One can imagine that the isolated dot in the middle of Russia might, at one time, have been connected with the other red-haired regions before other peoples invaded the lands between them and cut them off.
Compare to the map of blond hair:
Blond hair looks like it has been spreading steadily outward from a central source.
So what does this have to do with Neanderthal admixture in Native Americans?
It means that I think the Native Americans may have closer to original levels of Neanderthal admixture, while people in Europe and Asia have lower admixture because they mixed with later waves of people who came from Africa and had no Neanderthal admixture.
3. The Bering Strait selected for Neanderthal admixture
4. Western diseases selected for Western immune responses
One of the interesting things about the Neanderthal DNA hanging around in people is that it appears to code for certain immune responses. West Hunter recently had a great post (TLRs, PAMPs, and Alley Oop) detailing how they work, but for our purposes, “provide immunity” is sufficient. Austin Whittall suggests that back when smallpox, influenza, measles, and all of the other Western diseases tore through the Native Americans, killing about 90% of them, the guys who had more Neanderthal DNA were more likely to survive because they were more likely to be immune to the same stuff as Europeans. By contrast, those Indians with less Neanderthal DNA may have had less immunity to the European diseases, and so been more likely to die, leaving behind a population of high-Neanderthal DNA people.
A couple of papers in Science and Nature recently proposed that Melanesian-related people somehow made it to the rain forest long after the other Indians got to the area. West Hunter helpfully summarizes them.
West Hunter suggests that the Melanesian-related people with their high-Denisovan DNA got to the Americas first, and were then replaced throughout the continents by later invaders, the ancestors of current Indians. The one place the Melanesian-related people managed to survive was in the depths of the rainforest, a very difficult place to conquer. Even today, there are “uncontacted tribes” living in the Amazon rainforest; if anywhere were a good spot for a group of humans to avoid getting conquered, the depths of the rainforest is a good one.
7. The low-Neanderthal and low-Denisovan area along the Baja gulf in Mexico.
So what’s up with that? As far as I know, the only people who don’t have any Neanderthal or Denisovan are Africans. (And even there, there’s a little, just due to back-migration from the rest of the world.)
Are these people descended from a totally different group that came directly from Africa?
There’s a tiny ethnic group in the area, called the Seri:
Dona Ramona of the Seri Indians of Sonora, Mexico
According to the Wikipedia, the Seri speak a language isolate–that is, their language, like Basque, doesn’t appear to be related to any other language on Earth–and they are not culturally connected with any of their neighbors. They’ve also held out significantly against Spanish and Mexican assimilation. In other words, they might very well be a totally isolated population that is not related at all to any of their neighbors.
The two different “real” maps how different things because they come from different scientists who came up with different data, but the overall picture is similar–if you look closely, both maps show a hotspot in Israel, for example. The second map looks less detailed, (hence their miss of several Middle Eastern hotspots,) but has a wider global range, which is obviously useful for our purposes. They also help show the importance of not putting too much stock in any single study about the distribution of a particular gene or allele or whathaveyou; different scientists come up with different numbers.
At any rate, while this could be just a totally random coincidence, if it isn’t, it’s awfully interesting, isn’t it? I know the Egyptians circumnavigated Africa; the Carthaginians and Phoenicians were also noted sea-farers. Or perhaps some other group I know nothing about from the region, before folks started keeping good records. Who knows?
8. Other people’s theories: Neanderthals, Denisovans, and H erectus made it to America before we did, and H Sapiens intermixed with them after they arrived; humans evolved in American, and then migrated to the rest of the world from there.
Log. graph of homicide rates vs. fertility ratesGraph of homicide rates vs fertility rates (data from the Wikipedia)
Take your pick. They’re the same graph, except the top graph has the homicide rate on a log scale and the bottom on a linear scale, because Honduras’s homicide rate is kind of off the charts.
I couldn’t fit all of the labels onto the graphs, but since most of the countries group by region, you can still figure out roughly where most of them go. The lower left hand corner, low fertility and low homicide, is filled with dots from East Asia and Western Europe. The central-middle-bottom section, of moderate birthrates and below-average homicide rates, has the Muslim countries. The far right–high fertility and medium violence–is mostly African. (Note that Angola and Gambia’s labels have been footnoted at the bottom of the graph.) And the upper left–high violence but moderate fertility–is Latin America. (The high homicide rates are one of the reasons I oppose unfettered Latin American immigration.)
While there is a positive relationship between violence and fertility, this is clearly not the whole story. Just eyeballing the log graph, it looks like a curved line would fit the data better than a straight line, but that’d require polynomial or quadratic regressions and we don’t really need to get into that much detail.
Rather, I suspect that just considering cleanliness explains the graphs: cleaner people are more easily disgusted by other people, and so have fewer children than their aggression levels would predict.
I haven’t found great data on overall “cleanliness” or “disgust rates,” but it appears that Latin Americans are some of the world’s cleanest people:
Brazilians shower nearly 12 times a week, and Mexicans wash their hair more than anyone else.
By contrast, the French and Russians are positively disgusting. (I’m giving India and China a pass here due to limited running water in their countries.)
Here’s another graph, showing similar numbers:
My personal experience with East Asians (Japanese, Taiwanese, etc.,) also suggests that they are cleaner overall than Americans. These countries appear to have been hit with a double-whammy–very clean and low aggression–driving down the interest in sex so far that 60% of girls aged 16-19 claim to be uninterested in sex or even despise it, and even 40-50% of married people haven’t had sex in the past month. They’ve even got a phrase for it, “sex disgust syndrome.”
I don’t find Japanese fertility rates concerning, just because Japan really does need fewer people and the sex-inclined Japanese will quickly replace the non-sex inclined ones, so the issue will work itself out naturally. (And at any rate, I am not really in any position to go telling the Japanese what to do with their own society.)
In our own society, though, I am concerned that decreased monogamy (more “hooking up” via apps like Tinder and Grindr, etc.) is leading to more, not less female concern about male sexual aggression, with all sorts of unfortunate side effects.
So, I’m going to let you in on a little not-so-secret: childbirth is horrendously painful. Don’t believe those bastards with their natural birth hoo-ha. There is nothing magical or wonderful about childbirth. You bleed copiously, you can barely walk for the next two weeks, and before modern medicine, you stood a good chance of dying in the process.
The US’s homicide rate is 4.7 deaths per 100,000 people per year. The UK’s is 1. Japan’s is 0.3. (Source.)
The “developed nations” have a maternal mortality rate of 16 women per 100,000 births. (Source.) (Note that one woman may give birth to more than one child in her lifetime.)
The “developing nations” have a maternal mortality rate of 230 per 100,000 births (and a much higher number of children per woman,) and some countries have maternal mortality rates around 1,000 per 100,000 births. If the average woman in these countries has 5-7 children, that works out to 5-7% of women dying in childbirth. (Though not every year.)
In other words, in the state of nature, childbirth is kind of like being stuck in the middle of WWII.
Let’s consider the male side of things. Given enough available females, a male could, hypothetically, sire one child every night for 30 years, resulting in 10,957 children, plus or minus a couple depending on the leap years. We’ll call 11,000 our “hypothetical male maximum.”
The man stands approximately zero chance of dying in the process of siring children, does not endure pregnancy or childbirth, and even if he depends on someone else to do all of the childcare for him, he still has a reasonable chance at his offspring making it to maturity. (After all, Genghis Khan didn’t get to be the most evolutionarily successful man in recent history by raising all of his bastards.)
In other words, for men, there is basically zero cost to impregnating a woman (other than, obviously, finding one.) Even under harsh economic/environmental conditions, every additional woman a man mates with is an additional chance at offspring. The only limiting factor is how many women he can convince to mate with him.
A woman, by contrast, can produce at max only about 20 children (9 months gestation + 6 months nursing / 25 years fertility). (State of nature does not have baby formula.) She needs a maximum of 20 mates, and can make do with <1 if she has to share.
Where the male number of potential offspring is practically limitless, by human standards, the female is decidedly limited. Which means that women must be picky. A male who has sex once with someone kind of meh is not seriously limiting his ability to have tons of awesome children. A woman who has sex with a guy who’s kind of meh is potentially wasting one of her very limited chances of having children on a loser.
Note: I am not claiming that 11,000 is a realistic number. Obviously even Genghis Khan himself probably didn’t have 11,000 children. The point is that male and female reproduction are vastly different, creating very different incentives.
The average male has approximately zero to lose and all the offspring to gain from a random fling, and thus is mentally ready to consider the majority of women as potential mates. If some of those women happen to not be particularly attractive, well, it’s no big loss.
Women, by contrast, endure high-risk pregnancies and births, for a very limited set of children. They therefore cannot risk having children with inferior males.
So it is in the male’s interest to mate with everyone in sight, but in a woman’s interests to eliminate the vast, vast majority of potential mates, winnowing her selection down to the best 1-4.
Which means that all other potential suitors, whether they’re 14 men in a small hunter-gatherer band or 4 million men in Tokyo, are sexually useless.
In fact, they’re less than useless: they’re a threat. Because it takes only one act of violence for one of those men to get another potential offspring, and for a woman to lose one of hers.
The difference between optimal male and optimal female strategies leads to conflict–not just between men and women, but also between men and men. If one man mates with 550 to 11,000 women, (11,000/20 children per woman = 550), that implies that 549 to 10,999 men are not mating with those women. And those men are going to be pretty pissed.
Monogamy is one of the more elegant solutions to this issue. The relative guarantee of one mate per person reduces conflict and increases parental investment in the children. But monogamy requires fidelity–reducing female interest in the sexual desires of the majority of men even further.
Disgust in the face of unnecessary male sexual attention helps keep women loyal to their husbands and protects their long-term evolutionary interests, even if people express it in really annoying ways.
On a global scale, poverty is probably a bigger predictor of suicide. But within the US there are some clear looking racial differences in depression:
Yes, I know that suicide and depression aren’t the same word. But I figure “depression” is kinda tricky to accurately document, (Is he really depressed, or just kinda bummed?), whereas suicide seems pretty reliable. And since whites and Asians probably have the best access to mental health care, the numbers probably aren’t being skewed by lack of Prozac among the poor.
I remember an article I read a year or two ago, but can’t find now, which found a correlation between depression and intelligence. More or less, the implication as I interpreted it, is that “depression” is functionally a slowing down of the brain, and during intellectual tasks, people who could slow down and concentrate performed better–thus, concentrating and depression look rather similar.
There are other, additional possibilities: people from further north get depressed because it’s dark and cold all winter/as an adaptation to the winters, and so the Finns listen to a ton of Death Metal:
I don’t have a map for Goth music; does anyone listen to Goth anymore? Hot Topic seems to be doing fine at the mall.
Or maybe depression is an evolutionary adaptation to make people more peaceful and cooperative by internalizing their aggression instead of killing other people. Here the difference between whites and blacks seems like a point of evidence, since whites seem to kill themselves at higher rates than they kill others, while blacks kill others at higher rates than they kill themselves. Perhaps aggression/depression can be toggled on and off in some way, genetically or, in the case of folks with bi-polar, in a single individual.
Asians, I suspect, are also depressives, but have lower aggression than whites, so they don’t kill themselves very often. Also, I don’t know what kinds of music they like.
I’ve long wondered why comets have such eccentric orbits and come from the far outer reaches of the solar system. Why aren’t there more asteroids with eccentric orbits? Why aren’t there comets in round orbits? Why don’t they generally hang out closer to the sun?
Happily, I think I’ve figured it out. Yes, a comet is a “snowball in space.” But a comet isn’t just formed when liquid water freezes, as it often does on Earth. A comet is formed when a body gets so cold, the air on it freezes. The nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, etc. This only happens very far from the sun–so comets can only form far to the sun. If they formed close-in, their gases wouldn’t freeze.
So long as a frozen body stays way out there away from the sun, we’re not going to see it. It’s only when comets come closer to the sun (say, by getting knocked out of their original orbits,) that their gases begin to sublimate under the sun’s glare and they appear as bright, fiery comets in the night sky. Then, if it is lucky, the comet swings back to its frigid neighborhood before it totally melts away.
This explains why the comets we see have such eccentric orbits–the eccentricity allows the comet to freeze, sublimate, and freeze again. Without that orbit, no bright comet.
I’ve been thinking about criminality, inspired by a friend’s musings on why didn’t he turn to crime during his decades of homelessness and schizophrenia. My answer was relatively simple: I think my friend just isn’t a criminal sort of person.
To clarify what I mean: let’s assume, similar to IQ, that each person has a “criminality quotient,” or CQ. Like IQ, one’s relative CQ is assumed to basically hold steady over time–that is, we assume that a person who rates “Low CQ” at 20 will also rate “Low CQ” at 30 and 60 and 10 years old, though the particular activities people do obviously change with age. Absolute CQ decreases for everyone past 35 or so.
A low CQ person has very little inclination to criminal behavior–they come to a full stop at stop signs, return excess change if a cashier gives them too much, don’t litter, and always cooperate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. They are a bit dull, but they make good neighbors and employees.
A mildly CQ person is okay with a few forms of petty crime, like shoplifting, underage drinking, pot smoking, or yelling at people. They make fun friends but they litter and their party guests vomit in your bushes, making bad neighbors. You generally wouldn’t arrest these people, even though they do break the law.
A moderately CQ person purposefully does things that actually hurt people. They mug people or hold up conbinis; they get in fights. They mistreat animals, women, and children. They defect on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. They make shitty friends and shitty neighbors, because they steal your stuff.
A high CQ person is a murderer; they have no respect for human life.
A common explanation for criminality is that poverty causes it, hence my formerly homeless friend’s confusion. Obviously poverty can cause people to commit crimes they wouldn’t otherwise, like stealing food or sleeping in public parks. But in general, I suspect the causal arrow points the other way: criminality involves certain traits–like aggression and impulsivity–that make it hard to keep jobs, which makes criminal people poor.
Good people, reduced to poverty, remain good people. Bad people, suddenly given a bunch of money, remain bad people.
I’m not sure how one would test the first half of this without massive confounders or terrible ethics, but the latter half seems relatively easy, if you can just find enough petty criminals who’ve won the lottery and aren’t in prison–although now that I think about it, it seems like you could look at before and during data for people affected by essentially government-induced famines or poverty events. Just a friendly wager, but I bet Jews during the Holocaust had crime rates lower than American inner-city-lottery winners.
But “criminality” is a complex trait, so let’s unpack that a little. What exactly is it about criminality that makes it correlate with poverty?
Subtraits: aggression, impulsivity, low intelligence, lack of empathy, low risk aversion, high temporal discount.
Any of these traits by themselves wouldn’t necessarily induce criminality–people with Down’s Syndrome, for example, have low IQs but are very kind and have no inclination toward criminality (that I have ever heard of, anyway.) Many autistic people are supposed to be low in empathy, but do not desire to hurt others, and often have rather strong moral compasses. Low risk-aversion people can just do xtreme sports, and high-time preference people can be bad at saving money but otherwise harmless. Even aggressive people can channel their aggression into something useful if they are intelligent. Impulsive people might just eat too many cookies or dye their hair wacky colors.
But people who have more than one of these traits are highly likely to engage in criminal behavior.
However, these traits do not appear to be randomly distributed (thus, criminalitty is not randomly distributed.) Rather, they seem to belong to a complex or archetype, of which “criminality” is one manifestation.
This complex has probably been more or less the human default for most of human history. After all, chimps are not especially known for not tearing each other’s faces off. And saving up wealth for tomorrow instead of eating it today doesn’t make sense if the tribe next door can just come in and steal it. In a violent, chaotic, pre-state tribal world, “criminality” is survival.
To summarize, briefly, Frost proposes that the precipitous drop in W. European crime levels over the past thousand years or so has been due to states executing criminals, thus removing “criminal” genes from the genepool. The sticky questions are whether the drop in crime actually happened when and where his theory suggests, and if enough people were actually killed to make a dent in criminality.
I suspect that Frost is at least partially right–many people who might have had children were executed instead–but there is another factor to consider:
A land where criminals are executed is a land where criminals are already useless or less than useless. They have gone from assets to nuisances (horrible ones, but nuisances nonetheless), to be swatted like flies.
In a land where criminals are useful, we do not call them criminals; we call them heroes. Is Che Guevara a murderer or a freedom fighter? Depends on who you ask. Is the man who crushes enemies, drives off their cattle and hears the lamentations of their women a hero or a butcher? In Mongolia, there are statues of Genghis Khan and he is regarded as the father of Mongolia. Vlad Tepes is a here in Romania.
In a land where marauding tribes are no longer a concern, you have no need for violent tribesmen of your own. In a land where long term saving is technically possible, people who do can get ahead. In these places, the criminality complex is no longer favored, and even mildly CQ people–too mild to get executed–get out-competed by people with lower CQs.
However, I do caution that recent data suggests this trend may have reversed, and criminals may now have more children than non-criminals. I wouldn’t count on anything being eternal.
Looking back over my own thought on the subject over the years, I think this is essentially reversal of sorts. Our legal system is built on the Enlightenment (I think) idea of redeemability–that criminals can be changed; that we punish the individual criminal act, not the “criminality” of the offender. This may not be so in the death penalty or for certain egregiously heinous acts like child rape, but in general, there are principles like “no double jeopardy” and “people who have served their time should be allowed to re-integrate into society and not be punished anymore.” The idea of CQ basically implies that some people should be imprisoned irrespective of whatever crimes they’ve been convicted of, simply because they’re going to commit more crimes.
There’s a conflict here, and it’s easy to see how either view, taken to extremes, could go horribly wrong. Thus it is probably best to maintain a moderate approach to imprisonment, while trying to ensure that society is set up to encourage lawful behavior and not reward criminality.
Your thoughts and reflections are encouraged/appreciated.
Maybe the Uncanny Valley has nothing to do with avoiding sick/dead people, maybe nothing to do with anything specifically human-oriented at all, but with plain-ol’ conceptual category violations? Suppose you are trying to divide some class of reality into two discrete categories, like “plants” and “animals” or “poetry” and “prose”. Edge cases that don’t fit neatly into either category may be problematic, annoying, or otherwise troubling. Your brain tries to cram something into Category A, then a new data point comes along, and you switch to cramming it into Category B. Then more data and back to A. Then back to B. This might happen even at a subconscious level, flicking back and forth between two categories you normally assign instinctively, like human and non-human, forcing you to devote brain power to something that’s normally automatic. This is probably stressful for the brain.
In some cases, edge cases may be inconsequential and people may just ignore them; in some cases, though, group membership is important–people seem particularly keen on arguments about peoples’ inclusion in various human groups, hence accusations that people are “posers” or otherwise claiming membership they may not deserve.
Some people may prefer discreet categories more strongly than others, and so be more bothered by edge cases; other people may be more mentally flexible or capable of dealing with a third category labeled “edge cases”. It’s also possible that some people do not bother with discreet categories at all.
It would be interesting to test people’s preference for discreet categories, and then see if this correlates with disgust at humanoid robots or any particular political identities.
It would also be interesting to see if there are ways to equip people with different conceptual paradigms for dealing with data that better accommodate edge cases; a “Core vs. Periphery” approach may be better in some cases than discreet categories, for example.
Whites–especially whites of my generation or slightly older–were explicitly taught (as kids and sometimes as adults) that there are no differences between racial groups; that all racial groups are friends; that it’s a small world after all. Our celebrities held concerts encouraging us to donate money to starving children in Africa, because, “We are the world.” We were promised a future of inter-racial harmony, where racial differences meant nothing more than liking tacos or needing less sunscreen.
Whites often fail at being racially inclusive, but they generally believe that they should be.
So it is generally with some surprise that whites learn that other people do not think the same thing about them. That a white person who marries a black person, attends a black college, dresses/styles her hair like black people, and devotes her life to the advancement of black causes might actually get rejected by other black people just because she isn’t black. Whites who have an interest in American Indian things, particularly religion, have another fine line to walk. You may watch respectfully, but you cannot join.
Some religions are very open to converts; Christianity in particular. Christians have trouble understanding that other religions might not be open to converts; other people might not want them.
As I see it, there are two main reasons to police the boundaries of a group: either because there are some benefits associated with being part of the group, like getting a job because you graduated from a particular school; or because you really hate people not in your group, like feminists who hate men so much they won’t let trans* folk into their gatherings.
Both of these notions go against white expectations. The anti-racist ideology teaches that there aren’t benefits associated with being non-white (that’s why it’s called white privilege, not black privilege,) and our generally cheerful assumption that we are all supposed to be friends, regardless of race.
Ruminating on (someone else’s) theory that people can effectively communicate/bond with others who are within about 20 IQ pts of themselves. I’m not sure how 20 was determined, nor would I expect any particular # to hold for everyone, but let’s just run with the general idea.
One of the implications (which is rather obvious anyway, but I like imagining it so I’m sharing it) is that intelligence, like a liquid sloshing around in your brain, may be applied more or less to different problems. We normally call this “concentrating,” but we can also think about it on a long-term basis as getting really good at something through lots of practice.
The amount of liquid sloshing around may be basically fixed, esp. by adulthood, (or slowly decreasing as you age, fuckfuckfuck,) such that given a variety of tasks and normal circumstances, you perform however is normal for you. But given incentive, you can divert mental energies away from their normal tasks to understand or do something harder than normal; this caries a certain cost, as it makes doing other things more difficult, but you can do it. This allows people to communicate with a variety of others, smarter or dumber than themselves, but not infinitely; since the fluid is limited, you have only so much to devote.
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One of the implications of this theory is that some people have a much easier time making friends/communicating than others. An average person, IQ 100, can effectively befriend people from 80-120, which constitutes the majority of the population. Someone with a 140 IQ, by contrast, can only effectively befriend people between 120 and 160, a very small % of the population.
A reasonable critique is that this may just be excuse-making on the part of people who are bad at socializing and have over-inflated views of themselves. And I am sure this is sometimes the case. But I also suspect there is something to the theory. Speaking as someone who is probably reasonably intelligent, I know that I don’t really fit in with or make friends with normal people. Not out of any sort of malice or purposeful dislike; not because I sit around thinking about how terrible and beneath me those other people are (intelligence is generally only something that occurs to me in retrospect). If anything, I’ve devoted a fair amount of energy to developing normal socializing skills, like looking at faces and asking questions and making conversation on normal topics. But this does not make these conversations interesting. It is generally with disappointment that I realize that someone who I thought might be interesting uses a lot of bad logic and has a bunch of bad ideas that are entirely predictable based on their class/age/tribal affiliations.
But I don’t think I am just a disagreeable jerkface; there are a few people whom I like quite a bit (actually, I think I generally like people better than they like me; my spouse says I am too optimistic about people I meet.) I feel fairly comfortable on blogs devoted to science and reason, and generally in communities that tend to attract fairly high-IQ people.
