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The Modern Galileo

egon said in #4691 2mo ago: received

What does it feel like to be Galileo? What is heretical truth?

The modern West does not recognize the traditional religious concept of heresy. Marilyn Manson with his upside down cross, piss crucefix in the art museum, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, it's all very stale and boomer. That horse is dead. We make a partial exception for Islam: if you paint Mohammed on a canvas, gallery curators will pretend through pressed lips that it doesn't exist, your emails will go unanswered, your calls dropped, and viciously butthurt swarths might kill you. But this is imposed from outside and below. Our own religious heresies, enforced from above by Pope and King, are long gone.

But religious or not, every society has heresy. Almost every; a heresy-free society is a rare jewel if you can keep it. We have no such jewel. Our heresy is the Blank Slate. We are giving you an OPPORTUNITY to CLARIFY. Surely you are a not Bad, you just made a mistake borne of privilege. Surely you are not an unfortunate, a deplorable, a sad man whose weak mind lacks defense against UNTRUTH and EVIL perpetrated by racist supremacists. We are giving you one last chance. You must DENOOOONCE.

But he did not denoonce.

Our modern Galileo is James Watson. A brilliant man, a true scientist, who gave up all of his awards and recognition to hold on to the truth. We will know we've won once James Watson is broadly recognized as a hero. We have not won yet. May he rest in peace.

referenced by: >>4694 >>4759

What does it feel li received

anon_mapa said in #4692 2mo ago: received

Let us honor Watson with his quote: “The one aspect of the Jewish brain that is not first class is that Jews are said to be bad in thinking in three dimensions . . . it is true.”

referenced by: >>4693

Let us honor Watson received

anon_bwvy said in #4693 2mo ago: received

>>4692

He deduced the helical structure of DNA without the aid of computer simulation, a world historic act of shape rotatation, so it checks out that he'd be early to understand the rotator/wordcel distinction, too. A man before his time.

referenced by: >>4695

He deduced the helic received

egon said in #4694 2mo ago: received

>>4691

Let's also remember Watson with a picture capturing his genius, not just the the face of longhouse that he stood against. A fearless man.

> Watson repeatedly supported genetic screening and genetic engineering in public lectures and interviews, arguing that stupidity is a disease and the "really stupid" bottom 10% of people should be cured. He also suggested that beauty could be genetically engineered, saying in 2003, "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

> Pragmatic and romantic in equal measure, he made a point of employing a number of research assistants and secretaries from the neighbouring women's Radcliffe College. The policy paid off, and at the age of 39, Watson married the 19-year-old Elizabeth Lewis, a Radcliffe sophomore. 'The conventional argument was I was looking for good genes,' he says, 'and she was very pretty.'

A Nobel prize for one of the most consequential discoveries of the 20th century. Happily married once, for life. Two children. A naturalist, never bowed, never apologized. A hero of the reality-based community.

Let's also remember received

anon_mapa said in #4695 2mo ago: received

>>4693

Haha. I have been too harsh on only one group. We know from speciation that if a niche exists in the environment, it will be filled. The answer is not so much to blame individual groups as it is to adjust the environment to change incentives. The economic pie is shrinking, so everyone is blaming everyone.

He discriminated amongst races in equal measure and for that we love him.

https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/james-watson-in-his-own-words/
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/12/01/james-watson-words/
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/11/28/unfair-to-james-watson/

---

Some anti-Semitism is justified.

All our social policies are based on the fact that [Africans] intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.

The one aspect of the Jewish brain that is not first class is that Jews are said to be bad in thinking in three dimensions.. it is true.

I think now we’re in a terrible sitution where we should pay the rich people to have children.. if we don’t encourage procreation of wealthier citizens, IQ levels will most definitely fall.

Indians in [my] experience [are] servile.. because of selection under the caste system.

East Asian students [tend] to be conformist, because of selection for conformity in ancient Chinese society.

Haha. I have been to received

anon_kwbe said in #4699 2mo ago: received

An excellent eulogy
https://chadcrowley.substack.com/p/james-watson-and-the-price-of-truth

An excellent eulogy. received

anonzydo said in #4759 1mo ago: received

>>4691
Eugenics is the modern "Galileo". It is a technology which astounds me both in its possibilities and the extent to which it has been overlooked by even the most insightful minds after the World Wars. Why does it only ever merit a passing mention or a joke? Despite producing all of our modern crops, livestock, and breeds of man, it is still RARELY focused on, and afaik has NEVER been included in the various RW toy society models. This is something with the power to restructure human breeding, socialization, classes, and beliefs to an extent unknown since industrialization or even the Neolithic revolution.

referenced by: >>4765

Eugenics is the mode received

xenophon said in #4765 1mo ago: received

>>4759

There was a upswing in eugenic thought beginning in the 1870's. However, eugenics requires frank recognition of human difference, which is contrary to the core Enlightenment value of equality, one of the 3 main principles of the French Revolution. The fact of this dissonance was fully absorbed into Western intellectual culture by the 1930's, producing a sharp fork in the road with a forced choice between eugenics and equality. That choice was reified in World War II, and its consequences have metastasized in the decades since.

referenced by: >>4771

There was a upswing received

anonzydo said in #4771 1mo ago: received

>>4765
this is all true and known to me, but what I can't understand is why no non-western power since has utilized it even as many such as India, China, the USSR, etc have achieved great technological feats. I think the most prominent example is probably... Yao Ming. rofl
Possibly this could all be attributed to the dominance of the West, its exclusion from western thought, and subsequent stunting of scientific interest and progress even in areas of only indirect influence. Incredibly disappointing, since that reflects on these foreign powers rather poorly and paints them as incapable of doing much beyond copying the West even to today - but understandable.
I also can't understand why the highest position it's achieved in the new online RW is as a joke, a catchline, for Amarnites and BAP. Nobody accounts for it to the extent it deserves, nobody reads the original proponents of the theory. I can count on my hands the mentions of Shockley, Galton, or Pearson that I've seen in all the sphere, let alone the old science fiction arguments or more obscure academics. At best you'll get an out-of-context Churchill or Roosevelt talking about racial suicide, which isn't seen today in the light it was actually uttered in. It's ridiculous!

referenced by: >>4779 >>4793

this is all true and received

anon_kwbe said in #4779 1mo ago: received

>>4771

A big problem with "eugenics" is that it is just very slow. A great leader that improves fertility distribution helps his country in 20-50 years.

The USSR did adjacent things like technologically advanced doping... this let them win Olympic gold on a timescale of a few years. A well-executed skilled immigration policy has benefits over 10 years. But "eugenics" is 20+, and nobody has the patience for that.

This may change. The word "eugenics" is completely cooked and should be discarded. But birthrate collapse is real, is a pressing and immediate problem in many countries, and taking dramatic and active steps to fix will be normalized shortly. All easy ways to do this (unskilled immigration, baby bonuses) are actually dysgenic. We should see at least a few countries with their heads screwed on straight taking active measures to increase their own high-human-capital fertility, which is the core of the problem.

referenced by: >>4780 >>4785

A big problem with " received

anonzydo said in #4780 1mo ago: received

>>4779
for the purposes of this chat, I'll continue to use the term "eugenics", but otherwise I agree the connotations are horrible.
However, I disagree. Not only must you account for the fact that conscious removal or marginalization of dysgenic elements in society would immediately raise the common floor and good of society, but it serves as a quasi-religious foundation for society - perhaps not the entire picture, but a central pillar at minimum.
There is at baseline the actual, tangible effects of the technology. But then you have to consider the characteristics of a society which centers and widely utilizes it, which understands its potential and worth. I wasn't exaggerating earlier when I said it has ramifications comparable with the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions for human society. Fordism and its predecessors, for example, reoriented all the major Western (then elsewhere) cities around itself, its processes, and its products because it was both genuinely superior and served as a pillar of faith and future for their populations.
For how it can be implemented to best make use of these qualities, I'm not sure. However, I absolutely believe a form exists which is both immediately and in the long-term superior to existent societies, and I abhor the fact that very few non-ironic attempts at imagining this exist. Probably the majority predate WW2.

for the purposes of received

xenophon said in #4785 1mo ago: received

>>4779
> ... active steps to fix will be normalized shortly. ... We should see at least a few countries with their heads screwed on straight taking active measures to increase their own high-human-capital fertility, ...

What are the active measures you have in mind?

What are the active received

anon_bwpu said in #4793 1mo ago: received

>>4771
It might be worthwhile to poke into Chinese efforts after 1949, which are usually caricatured as pro-natalist until 1979 and then paranoid after. Eugenics was a major concern of Republican era intellectuals, who were deeply concerned with racial health; even if they are no longer well-known, and were oftentimes purged and rehabilitated numerous times, these men and women who admired Japanese eugenics programs and went to see Margaret Sanger in Shanghai, formed the ideological core of the Communist Party. The Communist Party's goals in making birth control and abortion available to impoverished rural areas and urban slums were not purely humanitarian. The Birth Planning Commission, established in 1964, despite operating through the most chaotic period of the country's modern history, successfully reduced the fertility rate, long before the stricter one-child policy of 1980. In the middle of the Cultural Revolution, they went down to the countryside to sterilize the poor.

After 1980, family-planning legislation was often tagged with the promise of "improving the quality of the population." The one-child policy, after all, was being carried out after fertility had been falling, was most ruthlessly enforced in places with the lowest-quality population, and was also something that the wealthy could usually sidestep. This was followed by a stricter set of rules on sterilization for those with hereditary disorders, mental illnesses, and so on, which was often interpreted in the localities as, "Sterilize the poor and stupid." In the dark days after Tiananmen and before accession to the WTO, these Chinese programs were viciously attacked by Western intellectuals.

Did they achieve their goals? Did the quality of the Chinese population improve? I would say, tentatively, "Probably." Would I term it an experiment in eugenics? Not myself being a committed booster of eugenics programs (in China, at least), I would grudgingly admit, "Well, yes."

Nowadays, of course, there is more talk of how to do the opposite—making sure that the best and brightest actually reproduce. Talk of "improving the quality of the population" remains part of the debate. Eugenics with Chinese characteristics is still on the table. Unfortunately, coercive programs are harder to direct and funding more difficult to secure for getting the beautiful people to have beautiful children (and even if there is no taboo on improving population quality, there are other, peculiarly Chinese problems, which hold it back).

referenced by: >>4830

It might be worthwhi received

anon_hoqu said in #4830 1mo ago: received

>>4793
I don't disagree that the Chinese are less allergic to eugenics than we Westerners, but I'd say that on balance the One-Child Policy was more dysgenic than not; it was most strictly enforced on Party members and the political elite, and exceptions were made for parents of disabled children (who could not work or give their parents an income to live on in the future) - probably the most explicitly dysgenic policy choice made in human history. Similar exceptions were made pragmatically for ethnic minorities, many of which are cognitively inferior on average to the Han.

The most explicit case of state eugenics post-1945 is that of Singapore in the 1970s-80s under the Graduate Mothers Scheme, the brainchild of the inimitable Lee Kuan Yew, who pushed university-educated women to marry earlier and have more children through cash benefits (a similar scheme was introduced to subject the less-educated to sterilization). Because Lee was unwilling to make significant social and cultural changes - and because the policy was profoundly unpopular abroad and at home (with the PAP bleeding support in the 1984 elections), the policy was soon given up and has never been repeated. Singapore remains to this day the quintessential IQ shredder. Spandrell made an interesting blog post a while back on the politics of hereditarianism. It is simply not compatible with the modern meta-political system, that I think explains why it's not done. It's not just about progressivism or whatnot:

"Even during the heyday of Western intellectual culture, when people could write books about phrenology or Negro intelligence and whatnot, hereditarianism wasn't popular politically. Cofnas mentions himself that Nazis didn't like Darwinism or IQ tests. It just makes for terrible politics. The game theory of hereditarianism is very simple. Say you have an election. There are two parties. One party, the Spandrell party, says, with overwhelming evidence, that intelligence is set at birth, education thus should be given according to measured IQ, in tightly segregated levels, with the dumbest just drilled to read, write and do basic arithmetic, and the smartest given public support to learn anything they want. Welfare is abolished and the general goal of all state policy is the improvement of the genepool, through generous subsidies to the healthy and intelligent. The other party says that everyone's a special snowflake, evolution stops at the neck, and we can all be what we want if the government spends enough money in edukashun.

Who's gonna win?"

Now "wasn't popular" is a bit of an exaggeration, the 1920s progressives loved it. But I agree that it's just not good politics in general, and that the only way to get a situation where the state can do eugenics openly and not furtively is through a moral revolution comparable to what the Christians or the Bolsheviks did.

referenced by: >>4837

I don't disagree tha received

anon_bwpu said in #4837 1mo ago: received

>>4830
These are good points. I know these policies would be enforced with Party members with the most strictness (and there was perhaps less need for coercive measures with them, than with people way out in the provinces), and that there were exceptions for ethnic minorities... But I was thinking, too, of the whole suite of programs after the 1960s, efforts in the provinces to sterilize the poor, the measures in the Maternal and Infant Health Care Law... Anyway, I don't say that it was a sound eugenics program! Is there a credible way to quantify the dysgenic effects (if not necessarily of these policies, then of Chinese policymaking since 1949, 1979...)?

On allergies: I think it was Spandrell who argued that although the Chinese are not allergic to eugenics for the same reasons Westerners are, many view these ideas with suspicion because they believe so wholeheartedly in the idea that education and cultural inculcation can overcome any deficiencies in IQ. So, maybe the people in the hills of Guizhou seem dumb and not particularly inventive, but it's just because they need better schools. It might be in the nature of a Mongolian to be stubborn, or in the nature of a Uyghur to be lazy, but with enough effort, you can teach them Chinese culture and send them to work in a factory. I'm not sure whether that is true or not, but I do find it interesting. I hope I'm not misstating his view, or misattributing it.

These are good point received

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