I don’t read my replies

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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • yesman@lemmy.worldtoShowerthoughts@lemmy.worldXXX
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    18 days ago

    During the early '00 flight sim fans were enjoying a Russian game called IL2. The other offerings from Microsoft and Janes just couldn’t compete with the level of detail in the flight models. Turns out, the people working on the game were all trained in aerospace engineering. The guys who went to school to work for the famous Russian aviation firms were making video games instead because it paid better.



  • Systems are not the sum of the individual actors who participate in them. Systems can influence and even control individuals back. Therefore, individual flaws in character or intellect are necessary, but not adequate to explain why systems are flawed.

    Consider the future imagined in the movie “Idiocracy 2005”. Society is collapsing because people are dumb. This is the explanation for all problems in that society. Capitalism, Resource extraction, environmental degradation, political corruption, and a rather authoritarian government are all blameless. The implication is that capitalism an authoritarianism are good if we could just be smart about it.

    This is a big difference between left and right thinking. Republicans argue problems can be solved by reforming individuals; the police are good, there are just a few bad apples. Or that the right individual, at the helm of a system, can clean up all the issues with strength and resolve. This is the central pitch for supporting Trump.






  • IQ does show differences between the races. However, this isn’t evidence that white supremacy is correct. It’s evidence that IQ testing measures culture when it’s supposed to be measuring biology.

    Race is constructed. Genetic, evolutionary, anthropological, and archeological evidence all point to shared ancestry and kinship. All the people’s of the world aren’t separated by near enough distance or time to explain a significant biological difference. And that’s ignoring the wide interbreeding that was always a thing. Remember Rome was cosmopolitan empire. Many of those Roman soldiers who marched down the first paved roads of London were swinging black cocks.

    So what can we make of a so called “objective” measure of a “biologically determined” trait that hews to culture above biology? This isn’t just a bias that needs to be tweaked, the whole concept of biologically determined intelligence is a reification fallacy and IQ as an instrument is hopelessly broken and should be abandoned.