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I guess in my experience people use the word race to mean any one of subspecies, cluster, or culture. Generally speaking, the biologists and the pro-genocide / pro-segregation people mean subspecies, the non-biologist geeks mean cluster, and the social scientists mean culture ("race is a social construct"). A lot of lay people don't really know what they mean. This just comes from asking people I talk to what they mean by race when they say race / racism / racist. So I just prefer to take the definition of race that we use for all other species, for the sake of accuracy. I can believe if in your experience everyone thinks race means cluster. And probably I could have gone on less of a polemic about it, so thanks for listening.

Interestingly, someone told me once that the anthropologists say that the best way to classify humans is on the basis of the food they eat. I don't have a source for that but it just seems like such an effective way to partition people.

Yeah I think it's primarily intelligence. (Although I've read only a tiny portion.) Odd in a way, because the physical attributes are easier to argue and test. My guess is that Moldbug would rather shoot for him being smarter by nature than him being weaker by nature.

You are racist iff you believe races exist or should exist. If you are using the word race to denote cluster even though you know better, you are being irresponsible on purpose and I consider you a racist in the "races should exist" sense. Moldbug knows better, he's not a stupid cookie.

A good environment and good genetics are necessary for high IQ. You can't meaningfully measure the contribution of genetics in the absence of a good environment. We may as well debate AGW.

I don't have a problem with identifying genetic clusters (descendants of people from Africa), I don't have a problem with the existence of stereotypes (African Americans a.k.a. blacks do poorly on IQ tests), I just have a problem with people knowingly jumping to conclusions on the basis of science that isn't there (the black race has a genetically lower IQ and that's why they fundamentally make good slaves). Moldbug isn't insidious because he's wrong, he's insidious because he knows he's wrong. Perhaps more accurately, he knows that he can't prove that he's right but he hides it.

The Eulering article was interesting, cheers. I think the anthropologists probably have a lot to say about all this, filed under ethnocentrism.

P.S. Just as an aside, I think you need to consider that genes dilute fairly rapidly into a gene pool, that humans have been migrating forever, and that there are no real purebreeds or biracial people from a population biology perspective. That said, this isn't a denial of clustering.

P.P.S. It's probably just as intellectually lazy to claim that all population groups have the same level of genetic intelligence, it's just a lot less offensive.

Either person B or C, depending on whether or not they are enforcing laws for the government. Possibly person A depending on what was said I suppose (e.g. if it's new legislation).

I get the IQ argument and agree. Thanks for the elaboration.

The problem I have is that population groups aren't races, even if you're talking about sickle cell anemia. "Black" is not a subspecies of human. And because of the way Yarvin conflates the word race with population group, I consider him a racist. In a matter-of-fact kind of way, simply by virtue of believing in the existence of races.

For what it's worth, in my experience most of the people that use the word race are racist, including the so-called anti-racists. It's a pointlessly divisive concept, both scientifically and socially.

His whole deal is genetics, it's the core of his argument. But if you read it carefully you notice all this rhetorical sleight of hand. The guy is one of the most transparently disingenuous writers I've ever encountered. I feel like the arrogance is just a cover for a weak argument that is just too painfully tedious to deconstruct.

https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lam...

> Here’s how you are not-racist. You hold two beliefs: one, neurological problem-solving performance (ie, “intelligence”) is homogenously distributed across the genetically inhomogeneous human species. Two, it’s better to be smart than stupid.

> Ergo, no race is better than any other race, because all races are equally smart. Is that right? I hope I have it right.

> Here’s how I’m not-racist: I share neither belief.

But he's a racist because he uses the word race in a genetic context, and so are you if you do the same - which is what he's trying to get you to do.

[ Sorry, I realize that this isn't the most coherent post... ]

My understanding is as follows. The root problem is that merely identifying races on a genetic basis is racist. If you believe that the race of a human refers to anything more than a social / ethnic / cultural construct, you are a racist.

This seems like a fairly neutral belief. However it's wrong scientifically by definition. In population biology, races are formed when there is absolute geographical isolation of a population. Without isolation, you get clustering of alleles but you don't get distinct races. Over time, the clustering of alleles diminishes, much like gas dissipating into a room.

If you're really struggling with this, just ask which race does the child of a man from race A and a woman from race B belong to? And when that child reproduces with more people from either race A or race B, what race do they belong to? And then ask how long has there has been contact between human populations? Do we know if there was ever a time that human populations were truly isolated?

End result is that biologists agree there is only one human species, Homo sapiens, and one human race (a.k.a. subspecies), Homo sapiens sapiens.

The page on Wikipedia about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

> Scientific racism is [...] the practice of classifying individuals of different phenotypes into discrete races.

So what happens here is that first Moldbug puts forth the false premise that there are genetic / biological races. Then he says stuff like black people have a lower IQ, but he's not discriminating, rather it's the belief that having a higher IQ is better that's discriminatory. (This was in the recent blog post about how he's not a racist.) Not only is this a really slippery position, but everyone gets so caught up in his arguments built on the false premise of the existence of races that it actually starts to implicitly build support for the false premise. I personally believe that getting people to accept this premise is the point of the trolling.