Note this was written in 2017. A lot has happened since the which affirms what GP is saying about the degradation of cultural capital here in the west.

Such as? From what I can see the most important parts of Western cultural capital are still in place and operating correctly (peaceful transition of power through elections, rule of law, freedom of speech)

More than just that, it takes a lot of luck. You need people in power at key moments who can rise to the occasion and then peacefully pass along power. You need leaders who build institutions and not networks of patronage. You need people in place who are willing to accept the constraints of rule of law, and to establish that norm.

I didn't downvote you but you can't really call it all luck, because if that were the case you would see a random smattering of countries becoming successful and others failing, however what you see in the real world is continents either being successful or failing. Unfortunately I think some of the major actors at play here are too politically sensitive to talk about, but I don't think there's much luck involved at the end of the day

I wonder what South Korea would become if tomorrow morning China invaded NK and SK and made them into a single country with North Koreans in charge.

I said it also requires luck.

> in the real world is continents either being successful or failing

Hardly. Chile is quite successful while Argentina is kind of a mess and Bolivia is worse. Uruguay is doing well also. Brazil is doing reasonably well, all things considered too. Venezuela is an absolute mess.

Europe is a really mixed bag as well.

Why is that something to take heart in? It sounds ugly and spiteful to me.

Is schadenfreude not your favorite flavor of ice cream?

No I genuinely derive joy from seeing others, be it individuals or entire nations, do well.

I’m not perfect of course, so sometimes I do feel schadenfreude. But I never mistake it for a good thing, but rather a sign of my own imperfection.

This is happening in the west for precisely the same reason it happens in africa - because the portion of the population with an IQ insufficient to maintain western techno-social standards is growing.

Meritocracy seems to be looked at with derision by some these days. It's a worrisome trend.

I blame hacker culture, were to gain with little input effort, aka a parasitic existence is cherished. Its prevalent in lots of places now, including the financial sector, were leveraging is more important then long term investment. The good thing though is, its self destructive, and the resulting riots will know who they want to take it out on.

Even if you have notional meritocracy, you're still screwed long-term if migration and reproduction patterns are dysgenic.

Meritocracy is biased for people with money, especially if you were born with significant sums.

Still it seems to have better results than outright aristocracy or primitive tribalism.

IQ is the wrong term IMO.

IQ is attempting to measure intelligence, and generally (but not always) ignores things like education, ongoing mental load (except for during the test), etc.

Intelligence is generally innate ability, but not what you would see day to day ‘under load’.

What we’re seeing is somewhat different IMO. It’s a decrease in the available executive function/free mental capacity of the population.

Executive function is the ability to synthesize the available information (past and present), and create a plan which produces the best outcome - and then follow it successfully.

Someone can have a very high IQ, and low executive function for a number of reasons - disorder (ADHD), bad nutrition, stressful or distracting environment, having too high a workload, or too much bullshit being thrown at them all the time.

Corruption makes it worse because it means it’s impossible to directly reason about how long something will take, or what resources it will take, without going through a bunch of opaque and situational hurdles. It also means tests and validation can’t be trusted, and it’s more likely the water system will be dangerous/cause disease despite everyone saying it’s ok.

It burns executive function and decision making ability.

Extra complexity of all kinds does, but bullshit is one of the worst.

SA had an evil, but competent gov’t so for folks ‘within the system’, things were relatively straightforward and worked as expected. That freed up a lot of executive function to do even more things that worked effectively.

With corruption and BS (aka say one thing, the other thing happens) everywhere, it burns more executive function and everything starts to rot everywhere else too, because everyone starts to get more and more expensive on the executive function side, just to stay alive.

Rather than just driving to a place, for instance, everyone has to figure out if it is going to go through a place that will get them killed (and /or kidnapped and raped).

Rather than just have working water, they have to spend effort figuring out if they need their own supply, how much to keep, when it needs to be rotated or treated so they don’t get sick, etc.

Same with power now, etc.

Often, societies end up stratified into layers based on available executive function. Being rich allows someone to help educate their kids and shelter them during key years, so they learn how to protect and grow that executive function, and aren’t exposed to as many of the traumatic effects that can hurt it. There is also a genetic factor that clearly shows up (not along race lines, but along family lines - it’s pretty clear).

Eventually, folks lose the plot or get pushed down a level due to external factors or mistakes. People with particular behaviors that fit well to the environment can also move up (unless suppressed) using wealth they’ve accrued due to effective function to continue to perpetuate what they think is important to have more executive function, hence class turnover/mobility.

Having a large swath of oppressed folks (who have had their ability to progress or sustain things that give them high executive function systematically broken for generations) take over for the folks previously maintaining it just for themselves, when those folks also disappear, is going to be a shitshow every time, for at least several generations.

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. As the site guidelines explain, that's not ok here, regardless of which ideology you're fighting for or against. Race/IQ flamewar is just about the worst of the worst btw.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html