Heredity and Character

Today’s “scientific racists” sometimes tend to discard all of human psychology except for IQ, because IQ is almost the only part of psychology that’s been quantified in a way that adds more signal than noise. This isn’t unique to the study of race; discarding the qualitative is a flaw common to lots of midwit science these days. But in any case it’s an error. Of course people vary in many ways besides intelligence. The Frenchmen and the Scots have very similar IQs but have notably different character, as do the Koreans and the Japanese. Bavarians and Igbo are even more different in character than the earlier examples, while still having pretty similar IQs. The English took over the world and remade it in their image with an IQ that’s certainly respectable, but not world-beating; the English propensity to conscientiousness, loyalty and tribal prosociality, will to power, and physical courage were all necessary as well. Of course we don’t know precisely how much of these differences in racial character are cultural and how much are biological, but just as with intelligence it seems very likely that both play a very big role, even if we don’t have quantitative psychometrics that can measure “courage” better than just eyeballing it. (And of course, just as with intelligence, this is about statistical averages and there are many, many individual exceptions and outliers.)

Raw intelligence is a big deal, and I’m not claiming that people are wrong to pay attention to it, but it’s certainly not the only thing that matters. The “IQ is everything” theory has to account for why the Ashkenazi haven’t taken over the world—a question I’ve thought about a bit, as I’m Ashkenazi myself. And yes, intelligence is a big deal and we excel in many fields. But we’ve also got some really big racial flaws. Our martial record is among the worst in recorded history, with minimal accomplishments for the two millennia between the Maccabean Revolt and the Arab-Israeli Wars, both of which were against decayed societies fallen from the height of their power; and you’ll note that even when we’ve assimilated into a society like the USA or USSR and become overrepresented in business and science and art, you still won’t see any great Jewish generals. We’re good as leaders of e.g. corporations and universities, and we’ve made the world’s best advisors from Joseph through Kissinger, but we punch *way* below our weight at sovereign leadership and at multigenerational empire-building. We’re good at rational trust but bad at asabiyah.

Other races have their own tendencies towards character traits—again, speaking of averages, there are plenty of individual outliers. Explaining these things requires looking beyond just “IQ” or “G” or nicely-quantified metrics, and usually ends up looking more like oldschool anthropology, or big sweeping historical interpretation. Perhaps more importantly, doing it accurately requires the intention to just describe the world as it is, rather than the intention to justify a particular racial hierarchy, which annoyingly is a much more common motivation among both ethnonationalists and among Europhobic "antiracists".

One factor that holds back psychometrics is that it's hard to quantify many of things we care about. After IQ, the next best validated factors may be the Big 5 factors of personality. They're not worthless, but they don't tell us everything one would want to consider. The simple truth may be that the traits that really go into cultural impact aren't simply quantifiable factors and so cannot be well studied by psychometrics.

In a world where everything changes so quickly and when you meet so many people, knowing the innate character of one you meet (to a limited extent) is a worthwhile educational pursuit.

You make some very good points. The unquantified and unquantifiable are routinely ignored, probably due in part to the fact that you can't Do Science! on them to make Number Go Down (p-value).

To one of your more minor points, I think that one of the reasons that contemporary ethnic anthropology tends to lose so many in the pitfall of supremacy is that the naturalist/materialist frame of science demands that the terminal good of mankind be somehow immanentized - men exist to build jet engines, or to create thinking sand, or whatever, and the men who don't do these things well are worth less than those who do. It's not actually possible to avoid this kind of supremacy if one is an atheist, or an agnostic without a sense of morality.

Put another way, if one wishes to catalogue the attributes and tendencies of the multifarious clades of the human species while remaining maximally dispassionate, it serves the cause of impartiality to labor under a theory of inherent dignity isomorphic with the concept of the human soul: something that everyone has, which entitles them to rights common to all. A solemn precommitment to the *circumstantial* nature of the particular body allotted a given soul inoculates the student of mankind against many dangers.

That being said, it's obviously no guarantee. But on a theoretical level, it should help, if one is the kind of person to practice what they preach (a rare enough breed in any age).

This doesn't entail that believers have to act like idiots and leave their Lambos unlocked on the streets of Senegal; quite the opposite. It enables them to exercise caution without buying-in to any cringe ideologies.

I wish to add: the belief in a soul is not without its additional mysteries when the question of ethnic tendency enters the chat. For example, how exactly does a transcendent essence obtain or reflect genetically-mediated tendencies from a material species?

> thread #1488

>>1495
Eh, I can buy that a supernatural belief in the soul might *help* with dispassionate character analysis and avoid weighting the scales for ideological purposes, but I sure don’t buy that it’s *necessary*. I’m an atheist and I think I manage just fine. It makes sense that “A solemn precommitment to the *circumstantial* nature of the particular body allotted a given soul inoculates the student of mankind against many dangers”, but don’t underestimate the inoculatory power of sheer autism.

Participants may enjoy Musil’s “Helpless Europe.”

>Therefore, if we want to promote the interaction and linking of ideological elements rather than leaving them to chance, we are faced with an enor-
mous organizational problem.

>This essential organizing function of society, however, rests in our time exclusively with the sciences, in the realm of pure intellect; in the humanistic area not even creative people recognize the need for it. On the contrary, precisely in humanistic circles (here used abbreviatively in contrast to unequivocally intellectual work) there exists no more stubborn prejudice than the belief that civilization’s entire misdirection, and above all its spiritual dissolution, can be blamed on the scientific spirit our society panders to. Science may be accused of creating all manner of imbalances and deleterious side effects, but whenever one maintains that it has a “corrupting” influence, what one invariably means is that science gradually dissolves values that were previously accepted as integral and emotionally safe.

>But science can only have this effect where these values already have cracks in their
emotional premises. The cause lies not in its nature, but in theirs! In its essence, the scientific spirit is just as syncretic as analytic; indeed, it represents probably the strongest binding force in human relations, a fact its dilettantish detractors overlook with surprising frequency. The difficulty, then,
cannot be anything other than a skewed relationship, an abiding miscommunication between the intellect and the soul. We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul. The
grievance that is held against science is really that the pathway of our thinking habitually circumvents our self as it connects thought with thought, fact with fact; we exclude our ego, our self, from our thoughts and actions.

>Therein lies, of course, the essence of our objectivity; it connects things one
with the other, and even where it sets us in relation to them, or, as in psychology, takes us as its very object, it does so in a way that excludes the personality. Objectivity sacrifices, in a sense, the inner aspect of objects.
General laws are impersonal; or, according to an appealing indirect formulation by Walther Strich,” one can’t vouch for a truth with one’s whole person. Thus objectivity cannot create a human order, but only a factual, impersonal one.

…

>Our way of thinking is…in no way equipped to change this situation. History, as indicated earlier, itself in need of assistance from ordering concepts, is only abused as an expedient in the search for them, while the humanism we practice is also at most only secondarily concerned with comparative perspectives, ethics, and the analysis of vital phenomena, seeking instead to grasp personalities, epochs, and cultures as totalities and
set them up as models.

Unfortunately, the essay raises more questions than it answers, though that is in some sense its goal:

>Such an ordering of art, ethics, and mysticism, that is, of the world of feelings and ideas…

>…has its own goal…it aims at an overview of the reasons, the connections, the limitations, the flowing meanings of human motives and actions—an explication of life.

>Perhaps it will seem odd for this survey of our situation to conclude with the plea for discipline. But a time that has not accomplished such work or acquired such discipline will never be able to contend with the immense organizational tasks confronting our age.

Some may recognize a popular quote:
>We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.

A vision of precision:
>the humanism we practice is also at most only secondarily concerned with comparative perspectives, ethics, and the analysis of vital phenomena

Since Musil wrote (1922), these have become primary concerns. So why the failure? Ideological capture preventing dispassionate analysis? Misguided approach after all?

One reason why Jews don’t run the entire world is perhaps due to their lack of spatial reasoning. Despite their high IQs they often have average or below avg. scores on spatial reasoning tests.

My extremely intelligent Jewish friend told me that he accidentally took the wrong route to school for years and wasted 5-10 minutes every time he walked to school, eventually figuring it out after plugging it into Google Maps one time.

Another example is the Israelites getting stuck in the desert on their way to the promised land. By biblical account the Promised Land was only 250 miles away and would have taken 11 days to travel on foot with women and children. God turned them away for not obeying/trusting him and cursed them with 40 years of wandering the wilderness. Maybe Jewish people lacking spatial reasoning is downstream of this curse from many centuries ago?

I definitely agree with one of your overall points that IQ isn’t everything and that culture and personality go along way. Jews are an extremely successful race, but I think below-average spatial abilities could definitely be a contributor to Jews’ lack of victories on the battlefield.

>>1488
Great post OP (nice dubs, too). I don't have much to add, as you've summarized the situation well. One note I'll make is to distinguish the ideological racists from the IQists. A large faction of racists don't care about IQ and think the other aspects of character (courage, honor, creativity, nobility, etc) are far more important.

The "why don't jews have even more power" question is interesting. Character probably has much to do with it. The thing about spatial intelligence, engineers, and military men probably doesn't help, but what I see holding jews back the most is the unwillingness to make peace with the gentiles' and moral order. This is just speculation, but my hypothesis is that jews can't get too close to true sovereign power because sovereign power requires taking a degree of responsibility for a positive moral order and its trade-offs that I've never seen from jews. There's always a remainder of identity separation, fear, resentment, subversiveness, and selfishness like you might at any moment be found out and have to pack your bags and skip town. You can't hold the mandate of heaven like that. This is what Zionism was supposed to solve, but you see this with how weird Israel is as a state: being savage and amoral in its behavior as a state but then also never quite being able to detach from the moral and sovereignty subsidy of host USA. It just seems like jews are more comfortable as the outsider and gadfly who extracts benefits within someone else's system. I've heard this expressed by multiple jews as well, so I don't think I'm totally out to lunch.

As for whether lack of spatial IQ contributed to the israelites being lost in the desert, I think that's absurd. The ashkenazi are only vaguely related to the ancient israelites, and the genetic selection for verbal unbalance happened in the ghettoes of europe, not egypt.

>>1503
I've long suspected the Jewish weakness at spatial reasoning is the reason why Jews are so much more overrepresented in science and software than in engineering. But the magnitude doesn't seem big enough to explain the horrible martial track record.

IIRC on the usual tests of this stuff, Jews score like half a standard deviation below European gentiles (who are, of course, far and away the most martially successful people of the modern era). The way bell curves work, this means you'll have way, way fewer world-leading geniuses, but no shortage of competent elites who can nail the basics. If that were the main thing going on, then Jewish military history would look a lot different than it does.

>>1523
keep in mind that collective social conditions can also impact things pretty hugely. Jews are culturally specialized into a niche that simply isn't military and hasn't been for a long time. Maybe that has impacted the genetics, maybe a lot is just culture. But it's not like there's some even playing field where people are plucked from their birth culture, evaluated objectively, and sorted into where they can succeed. Cultures specialize and people largely stay within their culture.

>>1528
This is an important point that I've emphasized in other threads. One can be a strong hereditarian (believing that key attributes have high heritability, maybe 0.7) AND still believe that culture matters enormously. It's only when you hold culture mostly constant (e.g., by looking at twins who are separated but nonetheless remain in the same country and social class) that it appears not to.

>>1528
>>1544

My favorite ethnographic question in the history of mathematics, and my personal Drosophila for these kinds of explorations, is why the Romans produced no mathematics of note (at least from the modern point of view) despite being the definition of civilization for the West. Verbal/spatial tilt really can't explain a fact like that, and whatever explanations one *can* bring to bear on the question would prove useful in analyzing how culture and intellect interact.

The writing I've found on this subject is garbage, which is sad, but the bright side is it forces one to think it through for oneself over and over and over. Is this a people whose best and brightest were completely immune to intellectual onanism? Or a people with no taste for the transcendent?

Were they forged in a different crucible than their Mediterranean neighbors?

Sorry for the trite primary schooler photo but verbal/spatial, theoretical/empirical, above/of the world, etc. always brings it to mind. Inescapable.

>>1554
> ... why the Romans produced no mathematics ...

The clear contrast here is with the Hellenistic (not classical) Greeks, who had tremendous scientific and mathematical advances, up to an early version of calculus.

The key work on this subject is The Forgotten Revolution, by Lucio Russo.
https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Revolution-Science-Born-Reborn/dp/3540203966

In Russo's telling, the Romans are the culprits who brought these advances to a halt because their whole orientation was towards wealth extraction from their conquered provinces.

(A modern is quick to say: but doesn't new science increase the means of wealth production? That's a second-order, abstract thought that wasn't at all intuitive in the ancient world. Even the Greeks who pursued science and mathematics didn't really conceive of it as directly connected to wealth production.)

Different peoples really do have different characters and habits of mind.

>>1557
Thanks for this, I will have to give it a read.

I have seen the wealth extraction argument (or at least arguments that sound very similar on the surface; don’t want to pretend they are anything like the book given I haven’t read it) before in a few places online. It sounds plausible as a reason for a lack of highly axiomatized, deductive enterprises, but it seems to me hard to defend for inductive and descriptive activities, and for “applied science” (to give it a modern name), which we know Romans did quite well in.

An argument that hinges on wealth extraction also needs to account for things like poetry and philosophy, though maybe the author would argue the Romans were poor at those things, or that their accessibility to a broader class of people made them more instrumental in some other way.

I agree that the modern association with wealth production is somewhat new, though the association of knowledge about the world as a means to power is not new: Archimedes was a Hellene and, whatever his attitude toward applications, no one can deny he was aware of their connection to his “basic research.”

>Different peoples, different habits of mind

Indeed. The interesting question to me is where those different habits of mind originate. Is it something in the early environment that forwver sets the tone? If we take Russo’s thesis, it still leaves one wondering Why the focus on wealth extraction?

>>1559

To be fair to Russo, the accent on wealth extraction was my gloss. I don't recall the extent to which Russo emphasizes that, though he definitely contrasts the Roman's strongly practical and less speculative orientation to that of the Hellenistic Greeks. He spends a fair amount of time of what he sees as the preconditions for scientific and mathematic advance in the Hellenistic polities.

Near the beginning of Science and Civilisation in China, vol 7 part 2, Joseph Needham argues that the most critical difference which distinguishes the past several centuries of Western science from medieval Chinese science is “the successful application of mathematical hypotheses to the systematic experimental investigation of natural phenomena”. I think this is right. Around the Tang and Song dynasties especially, China's technological progress was tremendous, probably the peak of both rate of progress and of overall achievement up to that point in history, but they never did the systematic mathematical-experimental natural philosophy that we take for granted now.

AFAIK, in all of recorded history, the Hellenistic Greeks were the only other people who did this systematic mathematical-experimental natural philosophy. It obviously paid off for them scientifically, and plausibly modern science might not exist without their example. Equally obviously, it stopped under the Romans—the legend of Archimedes' death is very poetic here.

I haven't yet read Russo's book and I don't know if his explanation for *why* it stopped under the Romans is correct. But the phenomenon he's trying to explain is very much a real one.

>>1565
Arguably we got mathematical science from the greeks, but I'd love to see a good historical analysis of how that happened. What greek texts were Newton and his predecessors reading?