Abandoned Steve Sailer years ago after a brief introduction. Mid-wit at best. Kind of a sociologist mindset. Ask him about the jews sometime. Draws a total blank.
<blockquote>For example, Charles Murray (pre-1995 SAT Verbal score: 800) is clearly an incredible, generational verbal reasoner.</blockquote>
With the highest respect toward Charles Murray, my initial reaction upon reading this was "huh, that sounds higher than expected". When reading Charles Murray, I, for one, haven't been struck by the impression that he is an "incredible, generational verbal reasoner", in the same way that I have been so struck when reading, say, that titan of 20th century analytic philosophy David Lewis (whom Steve, I seem to recall, once described as "ferociously brilliant" - assuming my own long-term memory holds up). That hardly seems surprising: after all, Murray is a public intellectual, and the problems treated within his books, the ideas explored, the arguments exposited, criticized, and positively propounded, etc., are, by definition, those with which public intellectuals deal, i.e., not exactly occupying the further reaches of complexity and subtlety. Whatever their myriad virtues, books like <i> Human Accomplishment </i> aren't exactly <i> On The Plurality of Worlds </i> by the latter score, and, after all, why would they be? Murray is toiling in a very different vineyard, and the "ceiling" of dialectical complexity and subtlety, so to speak, is vastly higher within the domain of the analytic philosopher than within that of the public intellectual. In any event, Murray confirmed his impressive but sub-perfect SAT-V score on Twitter some time ago:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Okay, I'll help you out. I've never taken an IQ test for which I have been given the results. I got 685 in math and 744 in verbal in the 1960 administration of the SAT (took it once, no prep, from Newton IA). I'd be curious to know what that translates to. Nothing earthshaking, I…</p>— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) <a href="https://twitter.com/charlesmurray/status/1673189277755392000?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 26, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Thank you for the correction! I guess in the future, I can't trust my own memory about people's SAT scores. (Though I stand by my assessment of Murray; his prose is unusually lucid. And have you listened to him in interviews? Sheesh.)
"For example, the upper range of the Verbal (now Critical Reading) test has been capped. Before 1995, it was very, very hard to get an 800 on the Verbal test. I came fairly close the first time I took the test in 1975, so I gave it another try, got a little closer, but gave up and didn’t take it a third time because the two scores seemed quite accurate: I’m very good at verbal logic, and have a certain gift for insights that other people wouldn’t come up with, but I’m not a meticulous thinker. I make lots of mistakes. I’m more of a let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes thinker. In contrast, say, Charles Murray’s brain works like a BMW V-12: powerful and precise. Mine’s a jalopy that might surprise you and win the race or might break down on the starting line and go nowhere. So, there didn’t seem like much point in me doing a lot of test prep to try to score 800 on the verbal — I’d still make a mistake or two or they throw a really hard question at me."
So Steve implied that Murray was an 800-level thinker, but doesn't actually say that he got an 800 (I guess he just assumed?) And I misremembered as "Charles Murray got an 800".
It's interesting to see how the game of telephone works. I read this article years ago and it made a strong impression on me (it's interesting how many of my talking points in Computerized Adaptive Testing FAQ are just copy-and-pastes of old Steve Sailer talking points without me realizing it). I remembered the *essence* quite strongly (such that I instantly realized that I had read this exact same post before), but the details were a bit more hit-or-miss.
Good review but I think he has shown some awareness or at least self-effacement with Obama conspiracizing, even time-to-time noting his (Sailer's) own upbringing around periphery of MIC munchkins. I still can't believe that whole thing (2008-now) happened; truth really is stranger
How citizenism can be associated with racism escapes me completely. Isn't the basic idea of citizenism to maximize the well-being of a country's existing population? And doesn't that imply valuing every citizen's happiness and well-being, regardless of race, as equally important?
Take mass low-skilled immigration for example. It obviously damages the welfare of the least-skilled and most vulnerable segments of the population, who are disproportionately African American, even as it improves the welfare of the more intelligent and already successful members of society by supplying them with yardmen, nannies, and the like. A true citizenist, as I understand the term, would nevertheless oppose mass low-skilled immigration on economic grounds alone (quite apart from the cultural issues).
Or take free trade combined with free mobility of capital in our new global economy: the fact that these two policies together increase total GDP, and hence average GDP per capita, does not justify these policies on citizenism grounds. Why not? Because it skews the distribution of income to such an extent that the general welfare is diminished. At least if you accept the principle of the diminishing utility of income, otherwise known as the idea that a dollar is worth more to poor people than to those who are already better off.
Maybe you should ask Steve whether his idea of citizensim implies maximizing the general weflare of a nation's existing citizenry in precisely these terms. I suspect that his answer will be yes.
I think the point being made is that if you want a society organised around the principles of citizenism, you need a population predisposed to conduct themselves accordingly. To recite the relevant quote:
"...white Americans don’t want, as he recommends, to act like the rest of the world; they want to act like white Americans. They believe on the whole in individualism rather than tribalism, national patriotism rather than ethnic loyalty, meritocracy rather than nepotism, nuclear families rather than extended clans, law and fair play rather than privilege, corporations of strangers rather than mafias of relatives, and true love rather than the arranged marriages necessary to keep ethnic categories clear-cut."
I am sympathetic to preference for a society to operate in this manner. But other than first establishing a very firmly majority white nation, how are you realistically going have such a society? If you have a highly heterogeneous society where it is mostly just white people abiding by these rules and everyone else is engaging in race relations as a zero sum game, white people will get screwed.
This is, of course, exactly what is happening.
Consequently, ethnonationalism, or more precisely, the goal of ethnonationalism - a racially homogeneous society - is a precondition to having the kind of society which operates in this way.
Right, this is pretty much my perspective. Citizenism seems to take this Social Contract Theory perspective on how society works that I've always found suspicious. It implicitly pushes this view that we have a Society and the Society has Values and then the Citizens just have to live up the Values.
This seems like a top-down theory on how societies work. But to me, it seems more plausible that what we call society *emerges* in a bottom-up way. You have a group of people who inhabit some geographic region, and they will have lowercase-v values in accordance with both their culture and their biology (as dictated by gene-culture co-evolution). Then at scale, this is what we call society.
The important part is that a society's values emerges from the biological predispositions of the people who constitute it. And different groups of people have different behavioral dispositions. (The last part is the controversial part to most people--but Sailer is a race realist, so he has no excuse.)
So if you want a high-trust society where people are colorblind and treated as individuals, you ironically need to be extremely race-conscious in order to preserve your values.
Citizenism is something like what LKY did in Singapore. Singapore has more diversity then most Asian countries, and even has a low performing minority group that makes up about the same % of the population as blacks in America (Malays).
LKY managed to successfully integrate that minority even as it clearly opposed him politically and he had to rely on Chinese ethnocentric solidarity to make sure the PAP won every election and could force integration on the other groups.
It’s unclear is the same could be done in the west. It’s very tempting for some faction of white people that would be in the minority to form a political coalition with non-whites so they can get one over on other white people. Whites lack the ethnic solidarity of East Asians, and our vast regional and ethnic diversity makes solidarity quite hard.
But what’s the alternative to making solidarity work? There basically is none.
"the goal of ethnonationalism" — in other words, assimilation and integration, which takes generations.
And as far as public policy is concerned, which ethnic groups would not favor policies which treat everyone's welfare as equally valuable. That's an honest question, by the way. Maybe there are some. Besides the ruling elites, that is, who often (indeed throughout history) prefer their own welfare over that of the people they rule.
I am not clear assimilation and integration is necessarily possible with the current racial demography found in Western nations today. With continuing immigration, there is no prospect of this occurring at all, as there is a constant and very substantial inflow of unassimilated, alien populations.
But even in a world with no further immigration at all, it would be centuries if ever before populations as disparate as Africans and Europeans interbred to the point where racial distinctions are no longer salient.
With the differences in genetic capital between the two groups, I am not sure such intermarrying would be a net benefit even if it did achieve the goal of making the racial distinction between whites and blacks no longer salient.
Nor is it clear that a population thus blended would have any great enthusiasm for the values espoused by citizenism. It is entirely possible that the merging of the two populations would produce a tribal identity that was prone to nepotism and clannishness, not meritocracy and individualism. Plenty of relatively homogeneous societies have such preferences.
The latter point would also be my response to your question about which ethnic groups would not favour policies grounded in fair mindedness and the common good. Most of the globe can be observed to behave this way.
Abandoned Steve Sailer years ago after a brief introduction. Mid-wit at best. Kind of a sociologist mindset. Ask him about the jews sometime. Draws a total blank.
(This is cross-posted from Steve Sailer's blog)
<blockquote>For example, Charles Murray (pre-1995 SAT Verbal score: 800) is clearly an incredible, generational verbal reasoner.</blockquote>
With the highest respect toward Charles Murray, my initial reaction upon reading this was "huh, that sounds higher than expected". When reading Charles Murray, I, for one, haven't been struck by the impression that he is an "incredible, generational verbal reasoner", in the same way that I have been so struck when reading, say, that titan of 20th century analytic philosophy David Lewis (whom Steve, I seem to recall, once described as "ferociously brilliant" - assuming my own long-term memory holds up). That hardly seems surprising: after all, Murray is a public intellectual, and the problems treated within his books, the ideas explored, the arguments exposited, criticized, and positively propounded, etc., are, by definition, those with which public intellectuals deal, i.e., not exactly occupying the further reaches of complexity and subtlety. Whatever their myriad virtues, books like <i> Human Accomplishment </i> aren't exactly <i> On The Plurality of Worlds </i> by the latter score, and, after all, why would they be? Murray is toiling in a very different vineyard, and the "ceiling" of dialectical complexity and subtlety, so to speak, is vastly higher within the domain of the analytic philosopher than within that of the public intellectual. In any event, Murray confirmed his impressive but sub-perfect SAT-V score on Twitter some time ago:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Okay, I'll help you out. I've never taken an IQ test for which I have been given the results. I got 685 in math and 744 in verbal in the 1960 administration of the SAT (took it once, no prep, from Newton IA). I'd be curious to know what that translates to. Nothing earthshaking, I…</p>— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) <a href="https://twitter.com/charlesmurray/status/1673189277755392000?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 26, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Thank you for the correction! I guess in the future, I can't trust my own memory about people's SAT scores. (Though I stand by my assessment of Murray; his prose is unusually lucid. And have you listened to him in interviews? Sheesh.)
I found the Steve Sailer article where I thought he mentioned Murray's SAT scores:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/asians-aptitude-and-achievement-win-win/
"For example, the upper range of the Verbal (now Critical Reading) test has been capped. Before 1995, it was very, very hard to get an 800 on the Verbal test. I came fairly close the first time I took the test in 1975, so I gave it another try, got a little closer, but gave up and didn’t take it a third time because the two scores seemed quite accurate: I’m very good at verbal logic, and have a certain gift for insights that other people wouldn’t come up with, but I’m not a meticulous thinker. I make lots of mistakes. I’m more of a let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes thinker. In contrast, say, Charles Murray’s brain works like a BMW V-12: powerful and precise. Mine’s a jalopy that might surprise you and win the race or might break down on the starting line and go nowhere. So, there didn’t seem like much point in me doing a lot of test prep to try to score 800 on the verbal — I’d still make a mistake or two or they throw a really hard question at me."
So Steve implied that Murray was an 800-level thinker, but doesn't actually say that he got an 800 (I guess he just assumed?) And I misremembered as "Charles Murray got an 800".
It's interesting to see how the game of telephone works. I read this article years ago and it made a strong impression on me (it's interesting how many of my talking points in Computerized Adaptive Testing FAQ are just copy-and-pastes of old Steve Sailer talking points without me realizing it). I remembered the *essence* quite strongly (such that I instantly realized that I had read this exact same post before), but the details were a bit more hit-or-miss.
Good review but I think he has shown some awareness or at least self-effacement with Obama conspiracizing, even time-to-time noting his (Sailer's) own upbringing around periphery of MIC munchkins. I still can't believe that whole thing (2008-now) happened; truth really is stranger
How citizenism can be associated with racism escapes me completely. Isn't the basic idea of citizenism to maximize the well-being of a country's existing population? And doesn't that imply valuing every citizen's happiness and well-being, regardless of race, as equally important?
Take mass low-skilled immigration for example. It obviously damages the welfare of the least-skilled and most vulnerable segments of the population, who are disproportionately African American, even as it improves the welfare of the more intelligent and already successful members of society by supplying them with yardmen, nannies, and the like. A true citizenist, as I understand the term, would nevertheless oppose mass low-skilled immigration on economic grounds alone (quite apart from the cultural issues).
Or take free trade combined with free mobility of capital in our new global economy: the fact that these two policies together increase total GDP, and hence average GDP per capita, does not justify these policies on citizenism grounds. Why not? Because it skews the distribution of income to such an extent that the general welfare is diminished. At least if you accept the principle of the diminishing utility of income, otherwise known as the idea that a dollar is worth more to poor people than to those who are already better off.
Maybe you should ask Steve whether his idea of citizensim implies maximizing the general weflare of a nation's existing citizenry in precisely these terms. I suspect that his answer will be yes.
I think the point being made is that if you want a society organised around the principles of citizenism, you need a population predisposed to conduct themselves accordingly. To recite the relevant quote:
"...white Americans don’t want, as he recommends, to act like the rest of the world; they want to act like white Americans. They believe on the whole in individualism rather than tribalism, national patriotism rather than ethnic loyalty, meritocracy rather than nepotism, nuclear families rather than extended clans, law and fair play rather than privilege, corporations of strangers rather than mafias of relatives, and true love rather than the arranged marriages necessary to keep ethnic categories clear-cut."
I am sympathetic to preference for a society to operate in this manner. But other than first establishing a very firmly majority white nation, how are you realistically going have such a society? If you have a highly heterogeneous society where it is mostly just white people abiding by these rules and everyone else is engaging in race relations as a zero sum game, white people will get screwed.
This is, of course, exactly what is happening.
Consequently, ethnonationalism, or more precisely, the goal of ethnonationalism - a racially homogeneous society - is a precondition to having the kind of society which operates in this way.
Right, this is pretty much my perspective. Citizenism seems to take this Social Contract Theory perspective on how society works that I've always found suspicious. It implicitly pushes this view that we have a Society and the Society has Values and then the Citizens just have to live up the Values.
This seems like a top-down theory on how societies work. But to me, it seems more plausible that what we call society *emerges* in a bottom-up way. You have a group of people who inhabit some geographic region, and they will have lowercase-v values in accordance with both their culture and their biology (as dictated by gene-culture co-evolution). Then at scale, this is what we call society.
The important part is that a society's values emerges from the biological predispositions of the people who constitute it. And different groups of people have different behavioral dispositions. (The last part is the controversial part to most people--but Sailer is a race realist, so he has no excuse.)
So if you want a high-trust society where people are colorblind and treated as individuals, you ironically need to be extremely race-conscious in order to preserve your values.
Citizenism is something like what LKY did in Singapore. Singapore has more diversity then most Asian countries, and even has a low performing minority group that makes up about the same % of the population as blacks in America (Malays).
LKY managed to successfully integrate that minority even as it clearly opposed him politically and he had to rely on Chinese ethnocentric solidarity to make sure the PAP won every election and could force integration on the other groups.
It’s unclear is the same could be done in the west. It’s very tempting for some faction of white people that would be in the minority to form a political coalition with non-whites so they can get one over on other white people. Whites lack the ethnic solidarity of East Asians, and our vast regional and ethnic diversity makes solidarity quite hard.
But what’s the alternative to making solidarity work? There basically is none.
"the goal of ethnonationalism" — in other words, assimilation and integration, which takes generations.
And as far as public policy is concerned, which ethnic groups would not favor policies which treat everyone's welfare as equally valuable. That's an honest question, by the way. Maybe there are some. Besides the ruling elites, that is, who often (indeed throughout history) prefer their own welfare over that of the people they rule.
I am not clear assimilation and integration is necessarily possible with the current racial demography found in Western nations today. With continuing immigration, there is no prospect of this occurring at all, as there is a constant and very substantial inflow of unassimilated, alien populations.
But even in a world with no further immigration at all, it would be centuries if ever before populations as disparate as Africans and Europeans interbred to the point where racial distinctions are no longer salient.
With the differences in genetic capital between the two groups, I am not sure such intermarrying would be a net benefit even if it did achieve the goal of making the racial distinction between whites and blacks no longer salient.
Nor is it clear that a population thus blended would have any great enthusiasm for the values espoused by citizenism. It is entirely possible that the merging of the two populations would produce a tribal identity that was prone to nepotism and clannishness, not meritocracy and individualism. Plenty of relatively homogeneous societies have such preferences.
The latter point would also be my response to your question about which ethnic groups would not favour policies grounded in fair mindedness and the common good. Most of the globe can be observed to behave this way.