From: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM)
Date: Sat, 14 Dec 1996 08:42:02 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Race and IQ
In-Reply-To: <199612140643.WAA32553@mailmasher.com>
Message-ID: <P4kXyD184w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
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nobody@huge.cajones.com (Huge Cajones Remailer) writes:
>                               there are people who can do things like
> play a drum with the left hand to 13 beats a measure and do something
> like 17 beats a measure with the right hand.  Those who aren't amazed
> by this should try doing three beats on the left hand with two on the
> right.  Call me when you master it.  ;-)
>
> If you lived in a society where this skill was considered an important
> component of social success, most of us would appear to be retarded.

Music is not considered important to economic suceesee in the West, so most
kids with a talent for it never get to develop it (or never even get
"discovered"). But "not being in the top basis point of the population"
!= "being retarded".

Is this trait inherited?

Does this trait enable the person who has it to accumulate more wordly goods
and to have more children? I suspect that it does in certain societies.

A drummer this good would probably be very successful economically in
contemporary Western society, while in his native village his skill is
wasted.

It's funny how Red's been conditioned to ignore the much more obvious
disparity in athletic skills. "White man can't jump."

> (Consider, for example, the ancient Chinese civilization.  Appointment
> into the imperial bureaucracy occured only after the applicants passed
> elaborate tests regarding their knowledge and interpretation of
> poetry.  That was the entire qualification.)

Again, the racist American doesn't know much about the elaborate Chinese
civil service exams, and dismisses them as "interpetation of poetry".

Crypto-relevant remark: the exams were anonymous. The candidate submitted
the exam paper under a motto (?). The graders were not supposed to know
the identity of the candidate.

> Many of the readers of this list are anarchistically inclined.  When
> we hear that African societies have tended to be anarchistic, we
> should applaud their wisdom and insight.  Perhaps these people could
> teach the rest of us a few things.

Most primitive societies (not only in Africa) tend to be (effectively)
fascist dictatorship, where the chief's word is the law, enforced by his
family members and leutenants. The chief would use this power to rob the
villages of the products of their labor, to rape their women, etc, and would
pass on this power to his son. The priests also had the power to rob the
villages (they don't work, but they've got to eat). The shamans could
declare a person a "witch"/heretic and have him/her killed.

Remember, whites *bought* almost all the slaves that were brought from
Africa to the New World. They didn't bring slavery to Africa. Western
civilization is the only one I know that voluntarily aboloshed slavery.

> few things.  Is there a history of welfare states in Africa, or did
> they practice voluntary anarchistic communal charity on the level of
> villages?)

Typically, there were slaves, and even the free villagers had the products
of their labor expropriated to feed the vast bureaucracy of chiefs and
priests. Also the women were treated pretty shabbily.

> (Incidentally, I question the claim that African societies never
> developed cities and bureacracies.  The Egyptians are the most
> prominent example.  Mathematically adept and literate they prospered
> for a couple thousand years.  A better run than the Romans managed!

Wrong. Egyptians' math was pretty much non-existent, compared even with
their contemporary sumerians' math. You can't get very far with "Egyptian
fractions". I guess Red's been going to a public school where the curriculum
writers tried to raise the self-confidence of minority kids by teaching them
how Egyptians invented the math that the Greeks stole from them. Sorry, your
teachers have been lying to you.

Egyptian civilization stopped developing the moment they created the strong
government based on deification of the pharaoh. There was not a single
invention, no development at all for thousands of years. Horses were
introduced by Asian conquerors. The writing system got simpler. Otherwise,
there was very little new at the time of Alexander the Great as compared to
the first pyramids. An amazingly boring history.

> We tend to think of Egyptians as being sort of like Europeans.  I
> believe this is because Europeans invented Egyptology.  Excuse me for
> pointing out the obvious, but Egypt is in Africa.  What is more, if
> you study Egyptian statuary, you will find many examples of distinctly
> African looking royalty.  Also, I know that cities like Timbuktoo were

Why do some people look at the lip thickness of the statues? There are
thousands of mummies to analyze. There are modern copts, the descendants of
the ancient egyptians. The results of their DNA analysis didn't satisfy
Red's teachers, so now they measure how thick the statues' lips are.

By the way, Ethiopians and Somalians are genetically closer to Arabs and
Jews than to African Americans.

> centers of Muslim learning and were large enough to have streets and
> houses.  We may know little about them because Europeans were not
> allowed to visit, and also for racist reasons.)

Timbuktu had a "medrese" (a place where young people memorized verses from
the Quran). There are hundreds of such medredes north of Sakhara, in Middle
East, Central Asia, etc. Every Moslem town had at least one. Timbuktu was
remarkable being was the only one serving the entire subsakharan region.

> Scientific questions aside, it isn't clear why the racial link to
> intelligence matters.  What are we going to do differently if it turns
> out that, on average, for genetic reasons, Albanians are less quick on
> the uptake than other people?

NOTHING. The individuals' dispersion from the average is so much greater
that whatever difference could possibly exist between group adverages that
it predicts nothing for individuals once any selection critera are invoked.

Consider a basketball team whose coach refuses to accept white players
because he believes that "white men can't jump". He'll miss on some
excellent white players who will join the competing teams. If this team's
objective is to win, then racial discriminations puts it at competetive
disadvange.

An h.r. person whose task is to hire a C programmer, and who refuses even to
interview black candidates because he believes that an average black
candidate is dumber than an average white candidate is likewise guilty of
economic fallacy (and also various crimes in the U.S.)

Even if it were true that the ancient Egyptians were genetically related to
subsakharans, and even if they had invented all the math that we attribute
to the various "Greek" mathematicians, what would that have to do to the
self-esteem of today's African-Americans?

> The link between intelligence and success is not at all clear.  We
> generally consider mathematicians and computer programmers to be
> smart, but in terms of total life competence, large numbers of these
> people live less than ideally.

Do you have any verifiable statistics to support this claim?

> The eugenicists propose murder.  This doesn't make any sense at all.

Now, you're lying. Certain people advocate economic insentives (paying the
people believed to carry undesirable genes not to breed), sterilization
(again, voluntary, in exchange for economic insentives) and better education
(e.g. pregnant women over certain age are strongly encouraged to find out
whether the fetus has Down's syndrome and several other common
abnormalities; it's up to them to choose to abort).

> Oliver Wendell Holmes, when he was a judge in Virginia, ordered the
> forcible sterilization of several young women.  The state would wait
> until they became ill and then when they were admitted to a hospital,
> they were sterilized under the guise of giving them some other
> operation.
>
> Holmes claimed that the grandmothers of the women were imbeciles,
> their mothers were imbeciles, and that they were imbeciles.  His great
> line was "Three generations of imbeciles are enough!"
>
> Curiously, it turns out that the word "imbecile" was a euphemism for
> "illegitimate".

I think you're referring to the 1927 _Buck v. Bell_ decision, where the
Supreme Court upheld the Virginia law that mandated forced sterilization of
imbeciles. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the decision, which said:
"three genereations of <Red Rackhams> is enough". That was 6 years before
Hitler won the elections in Germany.

What evidence do you have that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes a) was holding
a second job in Virginia, b) had anything to do with the implementation of
the law, c) that the young lady was not an imbecile?

> Red Rackham

Indeed, a typical "cypher punk".

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps