A fairer, faster and more effective system to level the playing field is to remove all race/gender/ethnic barriers and to make the barriers illegal.

If you want us all to live together, unite us, dont split us through AA.

If the only reason why previously disadvantaged individuals didnt succeed was due to oppression, remove all oppression and let them flourish naturally.

AA, is apartheid in reverse.

Nature is a perfect example of a working system. You dont introduce a new animal to kill a dominating species. It makes things worse. Instead, nature will balance it out by making the dominating species battle for resources and eventually die down.

Speaking of obvious things to study, I’d like to see some good game theory/evo psych/behavioral economic study identification and nomenclature that weirdly break out of the normal pageantry. Stuff that Steve Sailer, Anthony Cumia, Professor Gates, and Patrice O’Neal would blurt out at each other in an argument if they were all highly literate in current social science.

Black immigrants to the US are largely the descendants of slaves, just slaves in the Caribbean.

Black Americans average slightly shorter than whites, but have slightly larger standard deviation. Blacks in America and Japanese in Japan have lower standard deviation on IQ tests than whites. Height isn’t really a bell curve at the extremes. IQ is a bell curve in the middle by definition, but it looks pretty reasonable. I’d be a lot more nervous extrapolating it, though.

Yes, but the further out you go on the tail on a bell-curve-like distribution, the greater the discrepancy in group representation produced by an apparently small difference in mean or even variance.

It occurred to me long after this was said that all evidence points to greater genetic diversity among, say, Africans than among European descendants. Significant fraction of would-be European diversity would be expected to be “chopped off” by their historical exposure to more epidemics, and developing light skin, both of which select completely tangential to intelligence. Thus if one has to guess, I think the best bet is that African descendants have greater variance. (It probably helps too that African American’s have mixed ancestry.)

As Larry Summers pointed out, the effect of different variances overwhelms different means at the tails, which one might take to suggest that there should be a higher fraction of African descendants at the upper tail of ability.

Could you give examples?

There has been and is on-going really great scientific and empirical inquiry into Christianity. When it comes to race, even our best, most pure empiricists seem to me to become immediately tainted. Perhaps we can at least start by acknowledging that it’s one motherfucker of a bias-inducing macrosocial phenomenon.

One response is that in the specific case at hand we weren’t talking about 10^100 possibilities, but just two. But I could reply that if you randomly pick one possibility X out of these 10^100 possibilities you can define a set of two possibilities, X or not-X, and still in the average case P(X) is no larger than 10^-100.

Another response is to say that we ought to “privilege” possibilities that are simple to describe. The description of a typical element of a set of 10^100 possibilities is long (100 numerals in base 10), but a description such as “the sun will rise tomorrow” is short, so we ought to assign a somewhat higher probability to it. (This is reminiscent of Occam’s razor.) My problem with this response is that this is a statement about the possibility itself and its expression in our language. It does not have any connection I can see with our own fallibility as rational thinkers. And it was our fallibility that was the basis of the argument that we ought never to assign a probability as low as 10^-100 to something like “the sun will rise tomorrow”.

But you’re right about it being mostly meta/”outside the model”. It means you should listen to evidence that the mathematical model you’re using is wrong (rather than assigning literal 100% probability to it being accurate), but you immediately run into the problem of, how the hell do you treat the possibility that Bayesian inference itself is unsound? Well, you can say all your numbers are conditional probabilities on that not being the case, and in most situations treat those conditional probabilities as if they didn’t have a condition attached, but when a pathological situation comes up you can still deal with it.

My 10^{-100} bound is a conditional probability, and there are more conditions than just the validity of Bayesian inference. Some of those conditions, such as the validity of basic genetic and evolutionary theory, and the quality of the information I have access to, can be legitimately questioned at more like the 10^{-7} to even 10^{-3} level, so ZMD was right to object to taking my number literally. But without those conditions, I can’t make any inferences at all. So, as a decision-making agent, I take those conditions for granted, even though as a philosopher I don’t.