https://fxtwitter.com/DialecticBio/status/1835117100144509215
Could have been born in DPRK
Could have been born on sentinel Island
Born in amerikkka
sentinel island
Srsly wondering what kind of cool shit they got in there since they shoot missionaries on sight. Like what if they have an underground water slide or something?
Sadly the answer is more tragic and prosaic. They got sexually abused and kidnapped by missionaries and br*tish officer types and a bunch died of diseases they hadn't encountered before. So they made the logical connection that outsiders = extreme danger, keep away by any means necessary
The Easter Island episode of Fall of Civilizations was quite eye opening on the western habit of casual extermination, mythologisation as cautionary tales of "inferior savages", and commercialisation to sell plastic moai as cute garden toys with no history whatsoever.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Tbh I'd only be in it for the shooting arrows at whitey with impunity
"There is no scenario in which me, with my brain, my personality, and my genetics, could be born in Haiti."
"It's literally impossible to be born as someone else."
Yeah no shit sherlock, that's why its a hypothetical. If you took this to its conclusion then you'd realize your position in life is by and large an accident of birth.
All else is just cope to avoid feeling existential horror about people in Haiti by blaming them for their suffering on an ontological level and to feel as if you are part of a great white project so you can pretend that you fully deserve your treats.
IQ is, of course, bunkum, and only dorks take it seriously as a measure of anything but your skill at taking IQ tests.
Nice IQ you got there... be a shame if someone forced you into a situation that required skillsets outside of capitalist demands.
Or just put you in a situation where access to food is precarious. IQ is heavily tied to nutrition.
Not sure why but at some point Quora must have gotten the idea that I was super into IQ circlejerking and kept spamming me with really miserable
shit or people asking if they can get into X field with this much IQI think that is just 90% of Quora content and bubbles up to the top automatically.
Majority of supposedly high IQ people do nothing of value to contribute to the world lol. All the smart famous guys just happened to have a high IQ rarely mentioned it, if at all
Me for the most part: “Come on Zinn, you could have ended up a fascist like these chuds under the wrong circumstances. You were lucky to find the resources that you did to become a lefty, not your big brain.”
Me slowly more and more: “Actually, maybe it is your big brain that makes you a leftist.”
I don’t actually believe this, but I’d be lying if I said that snarling misanthropy isn’t a problem I have.
Embrace the random bullshit absurdity.
Srsly, though, I don't think anyone has a really good explanation for why people arrive at such different places, but it legit could be butterflies and typhoons stuff. Like one house watches football, the other watches, idk, whatever libshit kids cartoons have secret revolutionary messaging. Someone makes friends with a queer person, someone doesn't.
The thing about nature vs nurture is that people always imagine "nature" to be genetic instead of whatever random chemical bullshit happened in the womb while your brain was growing, and "nurture" to be Important Conversations with your parents and teachers instead of that one time you overheard some phrase that you completely misinterpreted because you were five and fully incorporated that misinterpretation into your worldview for years. But the total quantity of random bullshit outweighs the "important" parts by orders of magnitude.
random chemical bullshit
yeah people way overestimate the degree of determinism embodied in DNA.
Gene expression (epigenetics) are half, probably more, of the story.
libshit kids cartoons have secret revolutionary messaging.
Allow me to explain to Hexbear the hidden Marxism of Dragon Ball. As you see....
Yup. IIRC, Toriyama literally based him off a real estate 'developer'
I think a lot of young artists had their radicalizing moment with the economic crisis of the 80s and 90s in Japan
"The Krusty Krab is unfair! Mr. Krabs is in there, standing at the concession, plotting our oppression!"
Attention, people of Bikini Bottom! You have been cheated and lied to! The gentle laborer shall no longer suffer from the noxious greed of Mr. Krabs! We will dismantle oppression board by board! We'll saw the foundation of big business in half! Even if it takes an eternity! With your support, we will send the hammer of the people's will crashing through the windows of Mr. Krabs' HOUSE OF SERVITUDE!
Show
Right. Like just to make myself clear I recognize misanthropy is wrong and I fully condemn it, I just wanted to address that it is there.
For all similar comrades, I implore all of us, me included to recognize and silence the red bazinga that may lurk in many of us.
almost the same material conditions can still include the guy who works in a supermarket for a living and the guy who became a taxi driver for a living
I think a good point can probably be made here about not mixing different pairs of socks. One thing is talking about class or category, and acknowledge that there's some tendencies here and there. Another is individuals, and individuals are up to their personal history. So the real punchline here is neither (which does not prevent me from having a certain... experience with taxi drivers in particular).
I could see this making any kind of analysis of outcomes from arbitrary cohort extremely complex. This is outside my area of expertise and I'm definitely not a scientist (though I use it constantly). Perhaps I'm looking at this from the wrong perspective? It just seems that for any cohort the amount of variance would be so high that if you were to draw a conclusion from data it could already be wrong.
These would be two distinct yet connected sorts of data. The qualitative and the quantitative. One can disprove or question theories defined by the other, which is one reason why social sciences are in a permanent state of revision. Another reason is because your understanding of society is contingent on the very questions and framing devices you utilize.
Let's say you are investigating the birth of a city from an economic standpoint. Meaning that you wish to know what sort of trade or productive activity jumpstarted those first few cycles of capital accumulation. In the Americas you have cities like Rio de Janeiro which are so new that the documentation goes back to when there were only a few hundred families in the urban center + surrounding hinterland. So you have both the potential to realize patterns and variance, or the quantitative and the qualitative sides of your analysis.
You can look at specific families, what they did for a living, how they did well for themselves, what happened to their estates, what economic role mothers and fathers played, etc. And you can look at all families at once to find patterns. The quantitative analysis might help you make blanket statements such as 'the first and most primary form of capital accumulation for Rio de Janeiro was slavery, specifically the enslavement of native groups as part of allied wars and enslavement campaigns'. But if you go on to make another blanket statement such as, say, 'social mores in the wealthier sectors of colonial society followed a rigid patriarchical structure', then you'll find numerous examples of families where sometimes 3 full generations were outright led by the mothers and wives rather than the fathers and husbands. Sometimes because they appear to just be better at it than the men, sometimes because there were no men.
I'm framing it like this because that's how it works. We write our sociological narratives, and then someone else re-frames things a little differently and comes up with new and interesting inputs. It's not often that we completely disprove old, well supported theories. Rather, we end up refining them as scholars argue forever to the smallest detail.
oh, yeah, all those Chuds growing up in an environment saturated with white supremacy, police worship, imperialism, and transphobia? yeah, I wouldn't know what that's like.
Reminds me of those posters who describe being a Nazi at 17, before watching breadtube and becoming anarcho-syndicalist at 18, and if you're skeptical of their sincerity, they'll say it's purity policing and it's actually privileged to be a communist from the start, and not have phase of flirting with genocidal racial supremacism.
I see the things you're seeing and have come to the opposite 'conclusion' you have been fighting. During the rise of trump's popularity I've been forced to reevaluate my understanding of intelligence. Friends and family i considered 'too smart' have fallen for these thought-terminators time and time again. Through my terrible, terrible memory I even recall brain-worms i have shed. Only through time and effort have i overcome them, and more remain. Instead of hating humanity for its credulity i use their failures as warning signs against my own foolishness. The ego is our primary weakness against intelligence and grace, and the narrative makers know that.
I’m with you. Especially since 2020. I see lots of people with similar material conditions to me who have access to all the same information as me and largely are exposed unwillingly to the same shit as me. How am I the only one in the group that came to the conclusion “Getting covid 1000 times is bad” for example?
How are you like “idk maybe I should support Kamala Harris” when I know what your instagram feed looks like bc you have the same friends I have? Do you just care less about the dead children you keep seeing?
It’s honestly difficult to see people land where they are when given the same access to things as I am, and not be like “Damn, maybe I’m just smarter and have clearer morals than you.”
Morals are advanced.
According to one of my favorite psychological models, Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit-brain, the first circuit is survival, the second circuit is emotional, the third circuit is intellectual, and the fourth circuit is moral.
People get stuck in certain circuits and are easily exploited due to their stuckness. For example, Red MAGA is stuck in the emotional circuit, which is why appeals to their fears and “patriotism” work so well. Blue MAGA is stuck in the intellectual circuit, which is why they want to feel smarter than everyone else, even at the expense of having values.
By the time you have a moral code, you’re way beyond the comprehension of at least half of American adults.
Fuck these people obviously, but also counterfactuals like this (especially around identity) are extremely hard to evaluate, and I actually agree "imagine you had been born a different person" is likely nonsensical on analysis. The more important point is that you should be able to have empathy for other human beings without having to do weird possible worlds metaphysics.
Yeah, he’s kinda right in that he just wouldn’t be the same person at all. The soul stuff is bullshit but
There is no scenario in which me, with my brain, my personality, and my genetics, could be born in Haiti
is about right (aside from maybe his parents visiting Haiti at the time, but even then if he had parents willing to visit Haiti they probably would have raised him a little different). Although genetics probably plays a smaller role than he thinks, since being hateful is taught.
But of course all of that misses the point of understanding someone else’s situation and thinking how you would feel and act, i.e. having empathy.
Yeah, he’s kinda right in that he just wouldn’t be the same person at all. The soul stuff is bullshit but
It contradicts his entire point though. Like the whole idea is that each haitian is just individually bad. If you wanna go for that line, you gotta claim that if you were one of them, you'd be fucking balling. Or you're a failson, lifted only by those around you, but I don't think that's going to happen
Yeah you'd think realizing "I only am who I am as a result of the material circumstances of my birth, which I did not choose for myself" would engender some humility and empathy, and yet.
I don't really, not anymore. It's a hierarchy that's supposed to be defended to these people, doesn't really matter how they got there. It's not even hypocritical, on their terms, to think this. I have my place here, which was bestowed upon me, and the lessers may not get there is entirely consistent, if fucking garbage.
There are lots of hypotheticals that feel like they should be possible or imaginable, but which turn out to not be when you really think carefully about them. My favorite example to use in the classroom: imagine that while you're asleep tonight, the distance between every single thing in the universe doubles. When you wake up in the morning, everything is twice as far apart, but you're also twice the size! In addition, the tick marks on your rulers and all other measurement devices are twice as far apart, so all your measurements agree with measurements you took the day before. Therefore, the change is indiscernible.
This is a story that (to most people) feels consistent and imaginable at first, but that a little inspection will show is not (if the distance between things changed but fundamental forces behave the same way, we're going to have a bad time). Our intuitive judgement about what we can and cannot consistently imagine is extremely unreliable, and should not be trusted to do any philosophical heavy lifting. I think the people who are saying "I can easily imagine being me, but born in a different place, time, body, and material circumstance" are making a similar kind of error.
You cannot rely on hypothetical for anything scientific, that's not what they're meant for.
I get what you’re saying but also disagree on the conclusion, if I’m reading right. Feels like a form of solipsism which is just … navel-gazey.
Imagining oneself in another’s position is simple empathy, an evolved trait foundational to human civilization. The point is not to be able to perfectly imagine that other life, or to understand it in full detail. The point is to recognize common humanity between yourself and that other person.
In empathizing, I make a basic assumption about another person’s experience, in its intelligibility to myself, despite not having experienced it directly myself. It is like how in physics, we can’t prove beyond all doubt that the laws of the physics are the same in other galaxies (although there is of course strong evidence, e.g. spectral lines). I am reasonably certain of a baseline humanity shared by all humans, and on that basis I feel valid in empathizing.
Imagining being another person isn't supposed to be your "esssence" or mental mind in another body, it's to elucidate the fact that the act of experience across conscious beings is indistinguishable at an objective level and they're basically an experience machine trapped in different circumstances with different thoughts and environment. It's more about the separation of consciousness between beings and not minds per se.
We're all the same liquid poured into different glasses, as I like to say
I get more measurehead vibes with all the talk of IQ and trying to justify their racism with "facts"
Thats just a convoluted way to say you lack empathy.
Joke's on him as a Bodhisattva I chose to incarnate as a lowly European so I could guide the other
towards freedom.Soooooo, if we follow this line of thought and we brutally erase the lineage of Patmos from sea to shining sea, white souls will no longer be able to re-integrate into the cycle of reincarnation is what you're telling me.
...Ferb, I know what we're gonna do today.
Maybe this is shitty of me, but some chuds just seem really fucking stupid. The amount of people asserting we "have no frame of reference for what it is like to be Haitian," and therefore the hypothetical is invalid, is making me want to shit blood.
For my sanity: the point of reference for being Haitian is the lives and existence of Haitian people, which can be observed and engaged with even by non-Haitians.
Also just as trolling material for "race-realist" IQ-dorks: "Bright minds and dark attitudes: lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice through right-wing ideology and low intergroup contact" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22222219/
EDIT: https://www.livescience.com/18132-intelligence-social-conservatism-racism.html
That link also has stuff about other previous studies.
I'm sure they'll faint with shock at my radical experimental design of "Asking a Haitian."
The Jordan Petersons and Ben Shapiros of the world have convinced the dumbest guy from your high school that he is actually a genius and everyone else are the stupid ones.
I can never tell if people like this are intentionally misreading the question, weird nerds who are genuinely just taking the question at its most literal meaning, or just idiots who can’t wrap their heads around what is being asked.
I’m absolutely sure this guy is intentionally misreading the question to make some stupid racist point, but with others sometimes I’m not so sure
I vote we test his theory by bludgeoning him to death and seeing if he is born as someone else
For people that are obsessed with IQ their discourse is remarkably shallow
Lend me our energy for this 
ball.
now
Levels are OFF THE CHARTS.
