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The Case for Open Objectivism

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On 2/27/2019 at 3:46 PM, human_murda said:

No, you should take pride in your intelligence, genetic or not.

Free will, environment, quality education and nutrition are not mystical phenomenon.

Says the genetic determinist (which is the most common form of modern determinism; there's almost no other form of psychological determinism that exists today).

Oh, yes. Saying that some races don't inherently have lower intelligence is surely racial supremacy. Immigration = White genocide; White people have less power = racial supremacy of non-White people; Black people are not retarded = White guilt. Tell me more about how I incorrectly assumed you were White.

I said one cannot take "undue" esteem in one's intelligence. What one ~does~ with one's intelligence is the true source of pride. Intelligence is a human attribute, does one take pride in merely being human by biology?

"Says the genetic determinist". Etc. There is nothing (in Objectivism) which proclaims that all the biological and nurturing traits and influences in one's past have nothing to do with one's outcomes. There's one thing which transcends all of that, you may need reminding about: "Man is a being of volitional consciousness". This does not indicate that ~everyone and anyone~ can be, whatever he/she wishes: a major physicist, top industrialist, etc. In there are the Lefist-Marxist beliefs about ability-egalitarianism. 

You should not be assuming *anything^ about my race. You had nothing to go on; I simply asked how you knew I was white and you jumped to a conclusion. Believing this is important and that I play to any stereotype is actually racialist (not to mention, subjectivist). A black Objectivist could well have said everything I have. As it happens, you're wrong again, I am white.

The counter to white supremacism, "white male privilege" and so on, shrewdly and disingenuously manipulated by some factions today, has been turning to a kind of white-inferiority.  I.e., one must feel guilt and repentance for "past deeds" for being of that race. This is of course part of the collectivists' power-lust agenda, to allow some selected, other races, groups, 'tribes' to gain the upper hand, to replace whites by sacrificing them, as a group. In their self-abnegation, you can see many whites surrendering to this, in confusion. Mea Culpa. In refusing and avoiding the collectivist trap, individualists and Oi'sts should not be falling into what's worse, self-sacrificial altruism.

Edited by whYNOT
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  • 2 months later...
On 1/16/2019 at 8:02 PM, Nicky said:

If IQ is 80% genetic, then, clearly, the other 20% is environmental and cultural (cultural in the sense that it's culturally biased, not in the sense that the person grew up in a shitty culture...growing up in a shitty culture is an environmental factor).

That's not how they calculate heritability. An 80% heritability means that 80% of the variation in a trait is due to genetic factors. It does not mean that 80% of a trait is genetic and 20% is non-genetic. It doesn't say that 80% of 120 IQ points is heritable. It says that 80% of a couple of IQ points (say, 3 IQ points) is heritable.

Having a high heritability for a trait does not mean that the trait doesn't have a high environmental dependence (there could still be a high gene-environment covariance). That's not how heritability is mathematically defined. There are a lot of other problems involved: for example, they assume that IQ is a linear additive function of two variables (genetics and environment), instead of being a general function of the two variables.

Edited by human_murda
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On 6/20/2019 at 2:41 PM, human_murda said:

There are a lot of other problems involved: for example, they assume that IQ is a linear additive function of two variables (genetics and environment), instead of being a general function of the two variables.

Additional note: it should also be kept in mind that the "80% heritability" figure is not claiming that there is an 80% correlation between genetics and the variation in IQ. They have never measured correlation. Basically, the idea is that if one variable (IQ) is proportional to another variable (genetics), then the variances of these variables must also be proportional to each other. Basically, the 80% figure means that "80% of the variation in IQ could be explained by the variation in genetics" (heritability gives the variance in genetics as a percentage of the variance in IQ. It does not measure correlation). 80% is the theoretical maximum that genetics can contribute to IQ differences (the fact that this is the maximum comes from many of the assumptions involved in deriving IQ heritability).

The heritability measure already assumes that there is a 100% correlation between genes and IQ [for identical environments] as well as a 100% correlation between environment and IQ [for identical genetics]. Heritability is just a measure to determine the proportion of the contribution of each of them to IQ differences, under the assumption that a relation already exists (they also ignore covariance between environment and genetics).

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