Black and white people have equal terminal moral values, but white people are instrumentally superior to black people, so white people should tend to dominate over black people, and we want to give white people more material comfort than black people so that white people associate with us more.
This is an incredibly weird and disingenuous way of stating the position, there is no central authority to “give white people more material comfort than black people”, that’s not how this works. Salaries (and hence material comfort) are determined by supply and demand, if overall white people do jobs that are more in demand and in shorter supply than black people, then we should expect their material comfort to be higher. Do I “dominate over” my neighbor if I’m a high-paid surgeon and he’s a plumber? What a weird way of phrasing things.
If black people tend to have lower IQ than white people, then that’s an important explanatory cause for the difference in observed material income. Such a difference would also suggest different interventions than if no difference were there. Time and money currently being spent on various diversity initiatives would much better be spent getting pregnant black women to not drink and smoke, supplementing iodine, not being around heavy metals, i.e. mitigating all the environmental causes of low IQ, causes which we should research in much greater depth.
I do associate intelligence with moral weight to some extent (how could a Jupiter-brain have the same moral weight as a village idiot?), and an entire group of people having low intelligence is somewhat akin to a genocide-level catastrophe to me, everything should be done to ameliorate that state, and blinding ourselves to the evidence of the ongoing catastrophe does nothing useful.
This is an incredibly weird and disingenuous way of stating the position, there is no central authority to “give white people more material comfort than black people”, that’s not how this works. Salaries (and hence material comfort) are determined by supply and demand, if overall white people do jobs that are more in demand and in shorter supply than black people, then we should expect their material comfort to be higher.
I don’t understand what part of my phrasing of the position made you think I was talking about a centralized authority. My comment characterizing the position didn’t say that the position was “the central authority should give white people more material comfort than black people”, it said that the position was “we want to give white people more material comfort than black people”. Here, “we” is a nonspecific plural pronoun, which I intended to refer to the various people in society.
So for instance if you are a surgeon and your neighbors is a plumber, then the reason people pay you more is because they have a higher priority for making dealings with (associating with) a surgeon than a plumber, relative to the supply of surgeons and plumbers.
Do I “dominate over” my neighbor if I’m a high-paid surgeon and he’s a plumber? What a weird way of phrasing things.
Do you dominate over the person who used to live in your apartment if he is a plumber who had to move out because housing prices rose while you as a surgeon can move in because you are highly paid?
Do you dominate over the plumber if you decide how the plumber’s social media works, because you are smart enough to pass exams/interviews and work for the social media company?
Do you dominate over the plumber if you end up using your greater merit and accumulated resources to become a politician and make rules for what the plumber can or cannot do?
Honestly—the answer is probably not. While these do get close to fitting the definition of domination, I think they are too distributed and noisy to really be usefully thought of in that light. When you move into a city, you don’t bid up the housing prices for the person who moved out of the house, but instead slightly for the general market in the future. When you work for a social media company, you don’t make rules about any specific random person. When you become a politician, you are accountable to a great deal of different interests.
However, when you average over entire groups of people, then the noise averages out, and the diffuse effects add up on the group level. So it seems like the lens works on the group level.
If black people tend to have lower IQ than white people, then that’s an important explanatory cause for the difference in observed material income. Such a difference would also suggest different interventions than if no difference were there. Time and money currently being spent on various diversity initiatives would much better be spent getting pregnant black women to not drink and smoke, supplementing iodine, not being around heavy metals, i.e. mitigating all the environmental causes of low IQ, causes which we should research in much greater depth.
I think the difference is much more genetic than environmental. Though one could still search for environmental ways to improve IQ, I suppose—they just seem likely to apply just as well to white people as to black people.
This is an incredibly weird and disingenuous way of stating the position, there is no central authority to “give white people more material comfort than black people”, that’s not how this works. Salaries (and hence material comfort) are determined by supply and demand, if overall white people do jobs that are more in demand and in shorter supply than black people, then we should expect their material comfort to be higher. Do I “dominate over” my neighbor if I’m a high-paid surgeon and he’s a plumber? What a weird way of phrasing things.
If black people tend to have lower IQ than white people, then that’s an important explanatory cause for the difference in observed material income. Such a difference would also suggest different interventions than if no difference were there. Time and money currently being spent on various diversity initiatives would much better be spent getting pregnant black women to not drink and smoke, supplementing iodine, not being around heavy metals, i.e. mitigating all the environmental causes of low IQ, causes which we should research in much greater depth.
I do associate intelligence with moral weight to some extent (how could a Jupiter-brain have the same moral weight as a village idiot?), and an entire group of people having low intelligence is somewhat akin to a genocide-level catastrophe to me, everything should be done to ameliorate that state, and blinding ourselves to the evidence of the ongoing catastrophe does nothing useful.
I don’t understand what part of my phrasing of the position made you think I was talking about a centralized authority. My comment characterizing the position didn’t say that the position was “the central authority should give white people more material comfort than black people”, it said that the position was “we want to give white people more material comfort than black people”. Here, “we” is a nonspecific plural pronoun, which I intended to refer to the various people in society.
So for instance if you are a surgeon and your neighbors is a plumber, then the reason people pay you more is because they have a higher priority for making dealings with (associating with) a surgeon than a plumber, relative to the supply of surgeons and plumbers.
Do you dominate over the person who used to live in your apartment if he is a plumber who had to move out because housing prices rose while you as a surgeon can move in because you are highly paid?
Do you dominate over the plumber if you decide how the plumber’s social media works, because you are smart enough to pass exams/interviews and work for the social media company?
Do you dominate over the plumber if you end up using your greater merit and accumulated resources to become a politician and make rules for what the plumber can or cannot do?
Honestly—the answer is probably not. While these do get close to fitting the definition of domination, I think they are too distributed and noisy to really be usefully thought of in that light. When you move into a city, you don’t bid up the housing prices for the person who moved out of the house, but instead slightly for the general market in the future. When you work for a social media company, you don’t make rules about any specific random person. When you become a politician, you are accountable to a great deal of different interests.
However, when you average over entire groups of people, then the noise averages out, and the diffuse effects add up on the group level. So it seems like the lens works on the group level.
I think the difference is much more genetic than environmental. Though one could still search for environmental ways to improve IQ, I suppose—they just seem likely to apply just as well to white people as to black people.