Urban Analytic Nonsense

It’s an old friend’s birthday today, guy I text every year without needing to be reminded. Went to his Facebook to see how he’s doing, realized he blocked me on every platform. He’s a clarinet player I went to college with, we admired and pushed each other. We were Tanglewood fellows too, he even flew to my parents’ house in Jersey the night before and we roadtripped up to Massachusetts together. When we got principal jobs in major orchestras we celebrated each other’s wins, as friendly rivals do. My old photo albums are full of pictures of us together. I shouldn’t be sad or surprised because this has happened so many times, but it still stings. I admire Trump’s ability to turn on disloyal people but that’s not in my nature, I have that “sensitive young man” thing that makes me a good musician. I’m more used to it now than I was before but it never goes away completely. It’s true I have much better friends now and it’s good to let “soul contracts” expire but social death is not for the faint of heart. Hopefully someday we’ll all look back on this stupid period of social history with great disdain. I’m optimistic we’ll find a better way, that’s one thing I haven’t lost.

Why do black people have so many athletes who've made over $100 million, yet we don't own any factories, we don't have our own sports leagues, we don't have our own school systems, etc.? However we do have an oversupply of Gucci belts

Homeowner waits until construction job is nearly done—then calls ICE on 6 of her own workers. Woman even provides the ladder used by agent to detain men—who she owes $10,000 for 3 day job. "She called the damn law on us and now we're totally screwed!" men yell in Spanish. "They surrounded us!—They surrounded us!" Agents even left behind the workers' van with doors wide open—filled with thousands of dollars worth of tools. The arrest was broadcast live for about 30 minutes by a co-worker—identified as Bryan Polanco. "Seeing it is not the same as experiencing it," he explains. "I’ve seen many videos, and sadly today I had to experience it." At the end of the video he gets the woman who called ICE on camera: "It is the same woman. Tidying up the house, and still with hatred in her heart." The incident occurred in Cambridge, Maryland.

If someone argues that a former promiscuous woman is "damaged goods" and questions whether a Christian young man should marry her, remember Rahab. She was a Canaanite prostitute but became a mother in the lineage of Jesus. God redeemed her, cleansed her, and Salmon married her.

Oh God. These convos around race, genes, and outcomes are poorly framed and over-simplified. What you are saying sounds like it’s “cold hard truth that many resist,” but it isn’t as simple as saying it’s genetic without clarifying what that actually means and how it is applied. For one, not all white populations are equally productive and mentally talented/innovative (compare New Englanders with generational southern whites—not northern transplants to the south). Secondly, using civilizational complexity as a metric for genetic anything leads to unclear results, as these complex and “advanced” civilizations have only existed for a small timeframe in the duration of the “modern” human (not even 5% of our timeline). I always highly recommend reading Joe Henrich’s work on cultural evolution here. But, no, it’s not as simple as saying genes— and I’m not really swayed by arbitrary percentages assigned to genetic vs. cultural/environmental taken for granted in HBD sciences — have fun *reliably* disentangling the variables and the causal direction of them. There’s too much causal ambiguity when you add human behavior to any science. Lastly, I want to briefly note how historical and political contingencies heavily influence the composition of our societies irrespective of genetic makeup. For example, if we were to rewind the tape of history back and allow for voluntary African migration to the US, with a small welfare state and no obvious black-white grievance to exploit (politically), we’d have a radically different black population to contrast with other black populations. As it stands, perverse political incentives and historical circumstance have led to talented blacks always being overshadowed by less skilled ones—whites missed this trap for obvious reasons. I feel like the views people have about this stuff hinge on philosophical assumptions about the fundamental ontology of consciousness, human action, and so on. What happens is that most ppl in this space, especially online, just aren’t aware of the unconscious assumptions they read into the data. They think they are being “brave” by interpreting this information with naive and restrictive materialism.