Yeah, I really wouldn't trust how that book [by Richard Lynn] picks its data. As stated in "A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans":
For instance, Lynn and Vanhanen (2006) accorded a national IQ of 69 to Nigeria on the basis of three samples (Fahrmeier, 1975; Ferron, 1965; Wober, 1969), but they did not consider other relevant published studies that indicated that average IQ in Nigeria is considerably higher than 70 (Maqsud, 1980a, b; Nenty & Dinero, 1981; Okunrotifa, 1976). As Lynn rightly remarked during the 2006 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), performing a literature review involves making a lot of choices. Nonetheless, an important drawback of Lynn (and Vanhanen)'s reviews of the literature is that they are unsystematic.They're not the only one who find Lynn's choice of data selection suspect. Wikipedia describes him as:
Richard Lynn (20 February 1930 – July 2023) was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" [...] He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, which is commonly described as a white supremacist journal.
[From earlier in the comment] I can view an astonishing amount of publications for free through my university, but they haven't opted to include this one, weird... So should I pay money to see this "Mankind Quarterly" publication?
When I googled it I found that Mankind Quarterly includes among its founders Henry Garrett an American psychologist who testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education, Corrado Gini who was president of the Italian genetics and eugenics Society in fascist Italy and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer who was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of anthropology human heredity and eugenics in Nazi Germany. He was a member of the Nazi Party and the mentor of Josef Mengele, the physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp infamous for performing human experimentation on the prisoners during World War 2. Mengele provided for Verschuer with human remains from Auschwitz to use in his research into eugenics. [...] Something tells me it wouldn't be very EA to give money to these people.
Collectivist
I wonder what the deleted Roko comment was about
Are you talking about his -18 karma comment? It says:
Long post on eugenics, -1 points right now and lots of comments disagreeing. Looks like this is a political battle; I'll skip actually reading it and note that these kinds of issues are not decided rationally but politically, EA is a left-wing movement so eugenics is axiomatically bad. From a right-wing point of view one can even see it as a good thing that the left is irrational about this kind of thing, it means that they will be late adopters of the technology and fall behind.
It's also a way for the rich to subvert the democratic will of the people:
Let's say the people of Examplestan have a large underclass who live paycheck to paycheck and a small upperclass who gets their money from land ownership. The government is thinking of introducing a bill that would make their tax revenue come less from paychecks and more from taxing land value. Democracy advocates want to put it to a vote, but a group of futarchy lobbyists convince the government to run a conditional prediction market instead. The market question is "If we replace the paycheck tax with a land value tax, will welfare increase?". The large underclass has almost no money to bet that it will, while the small upperclass bets a large chunk of their money that it won't. Predictably, more money is betted on it not increasing welfare and when the market closes, everyone gets their money back and the government decides not to implement it.
The marginal value of money decreases as you get more of it. A hundred dollars might be a vitally important amount of money for a poor person, and not even noticeable for a rich person. So if you bet against a person with less money you are wagering less of your happiness than they are. If they have health problems (and live in a country with bad healthcare) this bet increases their risk of death, which it doesn't for you. It seems to me that betting against someone who is poorer than you is morally dubious.
No mention of the second castle either. And then Jan Kulveit says in this comment section:
For me, unfortunately, the discourse surrounding Wytham Abbey, seems like a sign of epistemic decline of the community, or at least on the EA forum.
While lying through his teeth in his comments on the post about the second castle.
They are now starting to get favorably cited on the EA Forum too:
Lynn and Vanhanen collected IQ scores from various studies and made corrections, such as adjusting for the FLynn Effect, , to produce their national estimates.
When a commenter cites a wikipedia page which shows that Lynn is 1) a self-described scientific racist who systematically picked datasets which gave black people lower IQ, and 2) It's called the Flynn effect, not the FLynn effect, since Lynn didn't discover it, he responds
A side point, but Wikipedia is politically biased. I intentionally capitalized the L to give credit as Richard Lynn's discovery preceeded Flynn's first publication. Although, his discovery was preceeded by Runquist.
The incel apologetics posts at least tend to present themselves as one degree removed by being 'backlash to the backlash' (recent example), it's the comments that tend to get truly unhinged:
Nearly all of my sexual and relationship success involved an unmistakable element of RPing Neutral Evil.
But incels are defined by their failure to perform well in these games, and they usually have innate (genetic, personality defects) that make them easy targets for abuse (see what feminists like the ones quoted in this piece have to say about them).
When the second castle (bought by ESPR with FTX-money) was brought up on the forum, Jan Kulveit (one of the main organizers of ESPR) commented:
Then never bothered to actually explain what the misleading and false claims actually were (and instead implied the poster had doxxed them). Then under the post this thread discusses he has the gall to comment:
I guess Jan doesn't think falsely implying the person who is critical of your chateau purchase is both a liar and a doxxer counts as 'epistemic decline'.