patrick.net

A less obvious thing that Damore pointed out was that slight differences in mean or standard deviation between two groups have exponentially pronounced effects at the extremes. From the graph above, you can see that at the 95th percentile it's basically only green and at 5th percentile it's basically only purple. In contrast, if you're looking at the 60th percentile of that trait, you have a 60/40 split between green and purple. Google has a reputation of only hiring people in the 95th percentile of certain traits, although I believe their standards have dropped recently for the benefit of the purples.

How is this the kryptonite of the left?

The mistake that the right keeps making is assuming the left is interested in honest debate.

You post this and think the left is going change any opinion they have simply because you pointed to so inconsistent belief they hold? Hahahaha!

They’ll call you racist, they’ll get you fired, they’ll end you.

The left is not about truth anymore. It’s about power.

I have been saying for years the first step is to acknowledge we are different.

pudil says

How is this the kryptonite of the left?

I got this idea from this chapter of Mencius Moldbug's "An Open Letter To Open-Minded Progressives":

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/06/ol9-how-to-uninstall-cathedral/?source=patrick.net

But imagine if you were an African or an African American intellectual. And it’s ten years from now. And you pick up The New York Times… (Hits Table) and some geneticist says, A, that intelligence is genetic, and B, the difference is measured on standardized tests. Between black people and white people, is traceable to a genetic basis. What would you, as a black intellectual, do, do you think? ...

There is plenty of evidence against human neurological uniformity. The question is simply what standard of proof you apply. By the standards that most of us apply to most questions of fact, the answer is already obvious—and has been for at least thirty years. If not a hundred.

Moreover, there is a simple explanation for the reason that so many people believe in human neurological uniformity (HNU). ...

So it is almost impossible for me to answer Professor Gates’s question. Asking what a “black intellectual” should do after A and B are demonstrated is like asking what a professor of Marxist–Leninist studies should do after the fall of the Soviet Union. I don’t know, dude. What else are you good at?

Professor Gates’ entire department consists of the construction of increasingly elaborate persecution theories to explain facts which follow trivially from A and B. Agree on A and B, and the world has no need at all for Professor Gates, nor for any of his colleagues. He seems like a pretty sharp guy. Surely he can find something. If not, there’s always pizza delivery.

The trouble is that—as we’ve just seen—A and B need not be shown to demonstrate the presence of official mendacity. It is sufficient to demonstrate that A and B are plausible. More strongly, it is sufficient to demonstrate that they are not implausible. Because we are constantly being “educated” to believe that they are implausible. The proposition is implied a thousand times for every time it is stated, but progressivism without HNU makes about as much sense as Islam without Allah.

I think they cannot hold together their world view in the face of very clear proofs undermining their axiom of "human neurological uniformity".

DooDahMan says

Patrick - are you familiar with this article on James Danmore where he talks about the famous memo and much more or is this a different James Danmore

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/16/james-damore-google-memo-interview-autism-regrets?source=patrick.net

Thanks, I didn't know about that article.

Of course it was his autism that got him in trouble! I believe that more than half of all programmers are at least somewhat autistic, and this gives them the mistaken belief that they can get away with saying true things just because they are true.

DooDahMan says

SunnyvaleCA says

95th percentile of certain traits

Any idea what those are ? Kind of curious

If my memory serves...

Damore was part of a discussion group tasked with trying to figure out how to get more women into the senior engineering spots at Google. Google actively recruits plenty of computer science major women directly from college (and men, too, of course), but they often move into other parts of the company instead of climbing the technical hierarchy to become senior software engineers.

Damore posited that one possible reason was that, on average, women are more interested in people whereas men are more interested in systems and things, so that women tended to move to become managers, designers, product managers, etc., whereas the men tended to chug along with the "systems and things" known as computers and software programming. Damore was very careful to point out that men and women were equally smart on average and that men and women were equally capable of becoming senior software engineers, but that women were just more interested in other things and so tended to move to other parts of the company.

Damore's memo had a graph like the one at the beginning of this forum topic. The horizontal axis was labeled "interested in people" on the left side and "interested in systems and things" on the right side. The green curve was the men and the purple curve was the women. He pointed out that if getting to the top of the software hierarchy required merely 80th percentile of "interested in systems and things" there would be a fair number of women (maybe 20%, for example); but, since getting to the top requires 99th percentile, it's basically all men. Basically, being in the 99th percentile of men is the equivalent interest of a women in the 99.99th percentile of women. Thus there is a 100-to-1 ratio at that extreme edge.

I believe that Damore also noted that, for many attributes, the curves for men have a larger standard deviation than for women. (i.e.: the curve is not as tall at the top but instead spreads out wider, when compared to the curve for women). For various measures of intelligence, for example, men and women are generally considered to be nearly identical on average, but that larger standard deviation for men means that there are more genius men than women but also more idiot men than women. I believe Damore may have mentioned that the larger standard deviation for men might also push more men into the 99th percentile category.

SunnyvaleCA says

larger standard deviation for men might also push more men into the 99th percentile category.

There was another similar topic on why most of the math professors are men. Same phenomenon explains the reasons behind.

https://babylonbee.com/news/experts-decry-shocking-lack-of-diversity-on-kenyan-marathon-team



Pretty much all top marathoners have East African origins, and top sprinters have West African origins.

It's genetic, not coincidental.

https://unherd.com/2022/12/the-rise-of-archaeologists-anonymous/

In the absence of genetic data, it was once possible to argue that changes in the material record (objects and artefacts such as pottery, stone and metal tools, craft objects, clothing and so on) reflected some kind of passive or diffuse spread of technologies and fashions, but this is no longer the case. For instance, for many years students and the public were told that “pots are not people” — that new styles of pottery suddenly appearing in the record does not mean that new people had arrived with them — and the appearance of the so-called “Bell Beaker” pottery in the British Bronze Age showed how imitation and trade allowed new styles of ceramics to spread from the continent.

But in 2018, a bombshell paper proved this was fundamentally incorrect. In fact, nearly 90% of the population of Britain was replaced in a short period, corresponding to the movement of the Bell Beaker people into Britain and the subsequent disappearance of the previous Neolithic inhabitants. We know this because careful genetic work, building from paper to paper, shows clearly that the new arrivals were different people, with different maternal and paternal DNA. Papers like this appear almost weekly now. Most recently, the confirmation that the Anglo-Saxons did indeed arrive from northern Europe has caused many academics a great headache, since for years the very idea of an invasion of Germanic peoples has been downplayed and even dismissed.

What seems obvious to the general public — that prehistory was a bloody mess of invasions, migrations, battles and conflict — is not always a commonplace view among researchers. Worse, the idea that ancient peoples organised themselves among clear ethnic and tribal lines is also taboo. Obvious statements of common sense, such as the existence of patriarchy in the past, are constantly challenged and the general tone of academia is one of refutation: both of established theories and thinkers and of disagreeable parts of the past itself.

Patrick says

and top sprinters have West African origins.

Yes, the slow-footed West Africans were captured as slaves, so only the fast were left. Natural selection. you know. That is what a Nigerian guy told me, anyways.

Academia like religious mythology is a form of regulation. The traditional academian has been a gentleman/lady of leisure i.e. member of the financially independent classes, holding their prejudices and viewpoints. Controlling the populace (often in the past barely literate or illiterate) with religion was de rigueur. Ignorance of the masses was not a regrettable condition, it was a necessary condition of rule.

True knowledge and learning was a pastime of the wealthy or a sequestered few. The 'Illuminati' believe they hold esoteric knowledge for themselves alone. That attitude persists. The run of the mill populace get the 'etch and sketch' versions of science and historical events, re-written for political, religious or upper class convenience. The universities cultivate a few divvies, but otherwise turn out mythologized mongrels.

There have been a lot of 'giant skeletons' dug up all over the world, including the USA and many on the Catalina Islands in SoCal. The Smithsonian sends out teams that will take over these digs under official threat and confiscate the skeletons. The diggers will enquire and get a brick wall of denial that they ever existed. What does the Smithsonian do with them? So, the Smithsonian isn't about natural history, it's about controlling the narrative of natural history. Why would they be so adamant about covering up the evidence of giants and very large humans from the past?