IQ Science Versus The Left

Steve Sailer has a post up on IQ that hits on a favorite theme. One of the things I have always found amusing about the HBD world is their naivete about the people in charge. This is a common problem on the Right and is found a little with the handful of thoughtful Progressives. They think that being right is enough. That eventually, the rightness of their science has to prevail over the oogily-boogily of the Standard Social Science Model.

Unless and until IQ science, HBD or even plain old evolution, becomes useful to the prevailing ideology, it will remain in an intellectual backwater. That’s too hard to accept so they often fall back on the myth of Galileo. That is, Galileo triumphed over the Catholic Church because his science was irrefutable.

The trouble with that, in addition to being untrue, is that the prevailing ideology of today is not as generous in spirit as the Catholic Church.The Church leaders in the Middle Ages were not anti-science. They were responsible for rescuing much of the knowledge from antiquity so that science could blossom. No, they were concerned about the orderly working of society, the faith of the people being a big part, the part concerning the Church. Fumbling through it was their responsibility and their burden.

The reigning ideology of today is a different animal. Cultural Marxism shares much more in common with Islam, in this regard. It’s Islam without an afterlife. The faithful, instead of living in bliss after death, can live happily in this life. Similarly, the unfaithful, the heretics and the blasphemers, will suffer in this life. What completes the circle are the ideological enforcers, sorting the chosen from the damned. Guess who fills that role.

Science really does not fit into this ideology. Egalitarianism, however, fits quite nicely. Everyone is equal and therefore unequal outcomes means someone is benefiting at the expense of another. That can be proof that the one is pious while the other a heretic. That also keeps everyone doubling down on the one true faith in an effort to reach the utopian end point, where all that is left are those in perfect equality.

It also is a never ending source of dragons to slay. Inequality is caused by someone. If it is not the impiety of the less, then it must be the impiety of the superior. Attacking that inequity becomes a holy cause. Egalitarianism, therefore, takes up the slack that the super natural used to handle in the olden thymes.

The other problem is that the people will never accept the implicit determinism of HBD and IQ science. No one wants to believe they were decanted as a ‘Gamma’, ‘Delta’ or ‘Epsilon’ so they will never believe it. If we started using IQ tests to sort school children into appropriate tracks, there would be riots. SWPL-ville mothers would demand some way to game the system so their little flower can be at least a beta.

The narcotic of egalitarianism is more potent than science. It’s not so strong down here at the bottom of the social order. Here. reality is simply too vibrant to deny. In the plusher suburbs of the middle-class, that’s not the case. They get to ape the mannerisms and ideas of the managerial elite and believe that one day their little angel will something better than them.

In fairness, believing nonsense has not been a deterrent to material progress. Perhaps one day the people in charge will be of another ideological persuasion that embraces IQ science and biological realism. I will not see it in my lifetime. Instead, crime thinkers like Steve Sailer will be forced to slave away in the mines at the edges of society.

That’s probably the natural order.

8 thoughts on “IQ Science Versus The Left

  1. “No, they were concerned about the orderly working of society, the faith of the people being a big part, the part concerning the Church. Fumbling through it was their responsibility and their burden.”

    I’ve spent to much time arguing this online. 🙂 The medieval Catholic church *is* the outlook of science full stop. Do not pass go. It’s easy to worship science when it’s evolved forward into almost magic. It looks like a waste of time and effort in 1300AD to anyone but a Catholic, to whom it looks like finding more proof of their worldview.

    The idea that Galileo triumphed over the Church and that scientists slaved away in hostile conditions is a scenario fit for novels, nothing more. That situation actually describes science for Islam, who would abandon all science after the Incoherence of the Philosophers was published.

  2. Pingback: IQ - Maggie's Farm


  3. Here you go Gunnar:

    IQ roughly equals general cognitive ability, also known as ‘g’.

    Below I have provided links to Linda Gottfredson’s work.
    The second link provides a chart showing Gottefredson’s expectations for job and life potential for people of different IQ’s as well as different races.
    All of this is highly un-PC of course.
    http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/intelligence/cache/1198gottfred.html
    http://www.thefullwiki.org/Linda_Gottfredson
    http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2005g-jobs-life.pdf

  4. Right-wing naivete. In politics I see it most often expressed as a confidence that the sane and rational politics of learned experience will of course prevail–after progressive politics has made a wreak of things–because it is after all the only thing that works. But progressive politics don’t succeed because they work, they succeed because progressives understand the true and instinctive nature of people, and enjoy playing the game of manipulation and power equally under plenty or in ruin. The totalitarian mind did not grasp until the twentieth century was well on that the democratic mind was the one which was most vulnerable to agreement.

    “To the revolutionary mind the American vista must have been almost as incredible as Genghis Khan’s first view of China–so rich, so unaware. Why should anyone fear government? Its cruel and cynical suspicion of any motive but its own was a reflection of something it knew about itself. Its voice was the voice of righteousness; its methods therefore were more dishonest than the simple ways of corruption.”–Garrett, 1939

  5. Interesting. I know that intelligence is correlated with success … but … what I have wondered, and never been able to find the answer to, is this: What does IQ measure. It is a percentile measurement, but what does it measure?

    I know that I am a 6-6 man, and that places me in a certain percentile. The percentile tells me my height compared to the rest of the population, but the measurements tells me a specific number of inches off the floor the top of my head is.

    If I have an IQ of 120, I know that I am in the 90th percentile. But 120 units of what? I know that I am six inches taller than a six foot man. But what is my 120 units mean compared to someone with 100? I can run 100 yards in 20 seconds. That places me in a low percentile. I know how much faster other people are.

    But I have no idea what an intelligence unit is. It is not speed of calculation. It is not accuracy of calculation. In that case, someone with an IQ of 75 could eventually do advanced calculus, given enough time, just as a cripple could crawl 100 yards given enough time. Difficulty of problem solving? OK, but what difficulty?

    One thing I have never seen is a chart that indicates what a specific IQ corresponds to in terms of intellectual abilities. Once we know that, then we can determine the educational and social policies that we should follow.

  6. Excellent post–one can only hope Sailer and similar types find their way to it. Egalitarianism is the reigning ideology but its strength does not come from logic and evidence. It comes from giving lots of status and power to people who lack the qualities to rise under almost any other system.

    And, as you point out, absurd egalitarian notions are pervasive even among people who are harmed by the Cathedral.

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