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jim777

Re:Questions on Sunday September 30, 2018 @08:15PM (#18109208)
You used the term "ethnic superiority". That's you making a value judgement about intelligence. It has absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote. Personally, I don't think intelligence is a good proxy for "value of a human being".

While there isn't a bullet-proof case, there is quite a bit of evidence for an ethnicity-intelligence correlation.

Re:Questions on Sunday September 30, 2018 @12:05PM (#18106716)
It's not about nationality: Ashkenazi Jews in general -- Israeli or not -- tend to be smarter. ~20% of Nobel prize winners are Jews compared to less than 1% of the global population. So either there's a Jewish conspiracy (which some people believe...) or Jews tend to be smarter.

Some people would say that this is cultural. I doubt it -- I think it's genetic. Intelligence is a physical attribute determined by genes, just like every other physical attribute. It's really no different from the observation that Kenyans and Ethiopians win most marathons.

In general, we should expect different traits to be exhibited at different frequencies by different populations that were reproductively isolated in the past. This doesn't mean prejudice is okay. Not all Jews are smart, and not all Kenyans are going to win marathons. We can acknowledge these correlations without behaving in a prejudiced way toward individuals.

Most people would rather not talk about this. And that's certainly my rule of thumb for in-person conversations. But, hey, we're on the internet.

Re:Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users on Friday September 28, 2018 @04:39PM (#18096847)
Man this post made me angry.

Being human is a morally brankrupt position. Accumulating wealth is a morally brankrupt pastime.

If you want to be a morally pure human, starve yourself -- that's the only way.

Re:Titans of Mathematics Clash Over Epic Proof of ABC Conjecture on Thursday September 20, 2018 @03:52PM (#18035027)
> When he told colleagues the nature of Scholze and Stix’s objections, he wrote, his descriptions “were met with a remarkably unanimous response of utter astonishment and even disbelief (at times accompanied by bouts of laughter!) that such manifestly erroneous misunderstandings could have occurred.”

Is this normal in advanced Math or is this guy kind of a jerk?