Getting out of my head

So partying for Halloween last night, I realized something disturbing. I do terribly with women when I am actually thinking. I just don't know what happens, when I down those drinks and all of a sudden I'm spontaneous and my game is on and I can say what needs to be said in the right timing and all of that stuff.

What is it about sarging girls that getting out of one's head is so critical to the process? And makes it infinitely more enjoyable? And how does one get out of one's head without the aid of alcohol? If I can figure that one out, then I would have hit the sweet spot.

Atheism

This is why I don't believe in a benevolent, omnipotent god (except maybe a posthuman universe simulation):

Apparently this guy believes that yes, Watson has a point. However, he makes a point that:


------
"In terms of natural endowment, Africa ought to be the richest of the continents but see the mess we have made of the potential for greatness which God in his infinite wisdom has bestowed upon us."

"As I write this, I do so with great pains in my heart because I know that God has given intelligence in equal measure to all his children irrespective of the colour of their skin. The problem with us black people is that we have refused to use our intelligence to organise ourselves socially and politically."
-------

That's just not true. Brain size has a .4 correlation with intelligence, beyond a doubt, and it's also proven, beyond a doubt, that Africans have smaller brains. That's a problem that is attributable to biology, not discrimination.

The ONLY rationale for denying HBD comes from believing in creationism. Because think about it. If someone believes that the human race emerged from natural selection, then the selection didn't magically turn off 150,000 years ago when humans left east africa. It continued.

From wikipedia's entry

"In the late 20th century United States, unequal reproductive rates favoring the less intelligent would have lowered the IQ of the population by anywhere between 0.35 and 0.8 points per generation had the environment remained unchanged over time. In order to create an IQ difference of 15 points between two populations in 100,000 years, natural selection would have to drive their IQs apart by only 0.004 points every generation – about 1% of the selective pressure in late 20th-century America. [135] Meisenberg argues that measurements of genetic diversity by the population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza indicate that the difference in “genotypic” intelligence between the most divergent human populations caused by random genetic drift should be about 12 IQ points.[136]"

Can you imagine what non random drift would have done? Like the selection pressures of an ice age or technology? Or disease? Or sexual selection?


So yeah, this is why I don't feel comfortable with either conservatives or liberals. Religious conservatives can't admit the role of evolution in creating human differences, while the liberals can't admit the possibility of evolution to create human biological differences. Both sides like to deny science when it's convenient for them.


Anyway, why would God create a race with an average IQ or 70, which basically prevents the majority of them from truly understanding God? How the hell can they really understand what it means to say" Jesus is my savior" if they have the mental age of a 10 year old? Can't happen. A 10 year old saying it has no idea what he's saying unless he's pretty bright.


It's a tough world out there. Liberals isolate themselves in their ivory towers and suburban bubbles, so they allow themselves to get deluded with visions of equality instead of of confronting the truth, because they don't have to suffer from their delusions. I consistenly find myself feeling guilty for my racial attitudes even though I know they are right.

To be truly compassionate and to truly understand the suffering of Africa and blacks is to acknowledge racial differences and make realistic policies. Building a well in a village, setting up a microfinance fund, or donating 10,000 mosquito nets WILL NOT CUT IT.

To an atheist, we just have this world. That's it. We have to make it the best, most just, and fairest world possible for everyone. Because when we die, that's it. So why not make the earth a better place? Why not give up your ideology and look hard at truths in order to really make a difference?

You World Bank people know what's up. Why don't you put your taboo ideas into practise instead of living in lavish hotels and preaching privatization with no regard for human ability? You like to think that you are great people because you're working to solve the problem of world poverty.

I'm sure it sounds great to starry eyed liberal co-eds when you tell them about the "passion" and "idealism" in the young africans you meet on trips.

You are truly scum if, knowing that your ideas will fail and that kid who'se smiling today could be dead from malaria in a year, CONTINUE to justify your fat expat salaries with standard economic theory with lots of formulas.

Wake up people. Life isn't all about fitting in, being liked, and having the best car or fanciest myspace page or the most amount of wall postings on facebook.

Do something with your god damn life.

1.4 Trillion

For what, exactly? With that money we can have alternative energy and a moon colony in 10 years. What a shame. If only more Steve Sailers spoke up in 2002.

Saw IV

Very interesting serious of movies. I admit it, I'm a saw addict. Last night I went to a saw marathon starting from the beginning and culminating in the midnight showing of Saw IV. Anyway, there are some interesting quotes:

"Congratulations. You are still alive. Most people are so ungrateful to be alive. But not you. Not anymore."

" Live or die, make your choice. "

"Those that do not cherish life do not deserve life."

Sounds creepy, I know. But, what is Jigsaw, ultimately? He is a premature eugenicist. He's culling the population of undesirables who don't want to live. Because think about it. In our modern welfare state it is easy to live. People do not have to struggle to survive. Hence dysgenics. But, what if you created someone who made people struggle in order to stay alive?

Anyway, a movie. A little gory, but that's ok. Some people need to be reminded that the human body is just a biological machine.

I <3 moral ambiguity.

Watson

Very interesting scenario with this Watson character. Either this can scare those who are HBD aware, or make them infuriated.

Or, people on the fence, like in the World Bank, or psychologists who have done serious research on this, will think differently. I wonder if anyone has seen a sympathetic review of his ideas from any non-traditional sources of HBD information.

Who sees the contradiction?

So apparently the Islamic Republic of Iran is making war on porn
and conservatives continue to condemn the regime. Is anyone going to ever point out that the hardline stance on Islamic regimes that the right takes is quite hypocritical given their agreements with many of them over social policy?

Then again, though, it's just as hypocritical for liberals to join forces with Muslim sympathizers. By not acknowledging the uniquely Islamic threat, Democratic candidates are giving credit to Rudy Guiliani.

Difficulties of Human Nature and Race

In Bob Herberts's post today in the nytimes, he claims

"The most important step toward ending the tragic cycles of violence and poverty among African-Americans also happens to be the heaviest lift — reconnecting black fathers to their children."

Unfortunately, what makes husbands stick with wives and fathers stick with children? Don't over think this one. It's simple - love.

Don't think I'm getting all fuzzy on you. Just in case you forgot, we have experiments addressing the chemical roots of love, the prairie vole experiment:

-------
Almost a decade ago, Thomas Insel, Director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Emory University, and colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health and the University of Maryland implicated vasopressin and oxytocin in controlling the preference for particular partners in both male and female prairie voles. These investigators found that giving a male vasopressin causes it to stay with its mate, whereas blocking this hormone prevents a pair-bond from forming. The scientists saw similar effects in female prairie voles, with oxytocin determining the extent of pair-bonding. In contrast, the administration of these substances had no influence on social interactions in the promiscuous montane voles. Surprisingly, vasopressin and oxytocin are naturally found at similar levels in both prairie and montane voles.
-------

Now, would it really be such a huge shocker to say that this chemical may not have uniform distribution throughout all races? That because most mammals are NOT monogamous, perhaps western society is the exception? That expecting monogamy from African American households (absent the extreme economic pressure that forced such association prior to the welfare state) is doomed to failure?



Tierney's blog on the nytimes has the occasional interesting article on gossip. Here is a clip:

-------------------

The researchers set out to test the power of gossip, which has been exalted by theorists in recent decades. Language, according to the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, evolved because gossip is a more efficient version of the “social grooming” essential for animals to live in groups.

Apes and other creatures solidify their social bonds by cleaning and stroking one another, but the size of the group is limited because there’s not enough time in the day to groom a large number of animals.

Speech enabled humans to bond with lots of people while going about their hunting and gathering. Instead of spending hours untangling hair, they could bond with friendly conversation (“Your hair looks so unmatted today!”) or by picking apart someone else’s behavior (“Yeah, he was supposed to share the wildebeest, but I heard he kept both haunches”).

Gossip also told people whom to trust, and the prospect of a bad reputation discouraged them from acting selfishly, so large groups could peacefully cooperate. At least, that was the theory: gossip promoted the “indirect reciprocity” that made human society possible.
-------------------

So, if there is a connection between large societies and the evolution of altruistic, behavior, could we now have evolutionary reasons to the dysfunction of most african societies? Remember, most African tribes were small and gatherer(minimal hunting).




Or, am I grasping at straws?

Until someone offers good, coherent, reasons for dysfunctional phenomena in the African AND African American community, I will continue to parse through evolutionary psychology literature and try to gain insight into peculiarities of race differences in behavior. To not explore these possibilities would be suppressing possible knowledge.

Lighter

I'm actually pretty happy that Gore won the Nobel Prize. It's not something that can really be denounced by mainstream conservatives, and it also makes the US look better in international eyes.

Now, if only he would run. Then I wouldn't have to choose between a fear monger and someone slightly more appealing but ultimately uninspirational.

A hidden gem

From the NY times article on affirmitive actions

------------------
Black students at better high schools have a much easier time, but it’s not as if they are keeping up with their peers. Even if U.C.L.A. tried to get around Proposition 209 by giving a big leg up to low-income applicants, it wouldn’t increase its black population very much. At every rung of the socioeconomic ladder, the academic record of black students is worse than that of other groups. As Taylor says: “There is a great deal of pressure to look for a proxy for race. There is no proxy for race.”

He and many other defenders of affirmative action consider this to be a self-evident fact, but there has also been a good deal of social science to support the view that the specific problems surrounding race — including discrimination — endure. One illustrative study found that résumés with typically black names are less likely to lead to job interviews than those with typically white names. Other recent studies have looked at intelligence testing. There have long been two uncomfortable facts in this area: Intelligence, indisputably, is in part genetic; and every intelligence test shows a gap between black Americans and others. For a long time, scientific research wasn’t very good at explaining this gap. But it has gotten better lately. For one thing, the gap between white and black adults has narrowed significantly since 1970, according to work by the noted researchers William Dickens and James Flynn. Four decades is too short a time period for the gene pool to change, but it’s not too short for environment to improve. Most intriguing, Roland Fryer and Steven D. Levitt, two economists (the latter is one of this magazine’s Freakonomics columnists), have found there to be essentially no gap between 1-year-old white and black children of the same socioeconomic status.

There are still vigorous debates about all this work — intelligence tests of 1-year-olds are iffy, for instance — but it points in one direction. Innate intelligence may be partly genetic, but it doesn’t seem to vary by race. So while race may not be the only source of disadvantage in today’s society, it is certainly one of them.
--------------------

I think the author set up the genetic straw man and took it down with weak evidence.
Steve Sailer has some good points, but I'd make some additional notes:
-He says that after correcting for socio economic status, there is no gap between one year olds.
Obviously an IQ test for 1 year olds is really suspicious. But, he also before says
-"At every rung of the socioeconomic ladder, the academic record of black students is worse than that of other groups"
How can you reconcile those two?

The way you reconcile that is that HERITABILITY OF IQ INCREASES WITH AGE. Yeah, seems counter-intuitive, right? But actually, twin adoption studies show that the highest correlation between twins (.6-.8) usually occurs in adulthood.

So, anyone that points to infant IQ tests to show that black children are just as capable as whites are truly being misinformative.

Also, there is another race issue here. I know Rushton gets alot of criticism, but his r-K is useful occasionally. African babies tend to develope faster than other babies in terms of coordination development and Asian babies lag the most. So, any study that compares babies is actually going BACKWARDS, as African children have an advantage in the studies at an earlier age.

Anyway, take it for what its worth. It would be nice to talk about things not dealing with race, but there is just too much absurdity and pop anthopology in mainstream media.