Luke Ford

From Steve Sailer:

As you can see from this video, everyone’s education is enriched by Diversity. Intellectual discourse thrives when everybody is hyperaware of their racial grievances…

Obama 2012 HQ

And that explains why Obama was beaten so badly by Romney in 2012: just look at the nondiverse Obama 2012 Brain Trust.

COMMENTS:

* The fundamental premise of the article is that diversity creates a low trust society, which is hugely beneficial. Bold stuff here, NYT.

* Diversity brought cognitive friction that enhanced deliberation.

This bit sounds plausible. When I walk through diverse neighborhoods in NYC I am extra-alert for my safety and it takes me extra effort to communicate with non-English speakers. I definitely have cognitive friction that enhances deliberation.

* So, things that people value that don’t have a number or dollar sign (see, especially, the book Priceless) and that they may be doing quite well at (think high-social-capital neighborhoods, where Robert Putnam showed diversity destroyed them) are ignored in terms of “performance.” Meanwhile, excellence at an artificial game far removed from the real economy (either this one or the actual stock market) is paramount. Once you get your oligarch-message-secret-decoder ring, this stuff gets easy.

I wonder how diverse the crowd at Galton’s county fair was?

* The list of nations in the world who are having self-dissolution demanded from them contains only European peoples and ALL European peoples are on the list. (a handful resisting successfully atm) This is in-your-face open race hatred of European peoples. We are part of the diversity of the world. If we don’t wake the hell up pretty damn quick, we will HAVE BEEN part of the diversity of the world.

* In the referenced article, the unstated premise that is meant to be accepted unquestioningly – the dog-whistle that is calling to be being obeyed – is that without affirmative action as currently defined there will be zero diversity (i.e., no minorities) at, say, the U. of Texas.

But this obviously isn’t the case. The removal of current affirmative action policies would not remove anti-discrimination laws. Nor would it remove the cultural outlook of school administrators or society at large. It would merely redefine the qualifications for enrollment.

It would no doubt reduce at some schools the number of some minorities while increasing the number of other minorities.

The NYT is saying it’s an all-or-nothing offer when there are other options on the table. In other words, the NYT is running a confidence game.

* Looks to me like this study strongly confirms Putnam: diversity produces “cognitive friction” and reduces the “undue” trust that similar people have for each other.

It’s possible that this does have a positive effect in the context of specific tasks, ones that require disagreement and have a strong incentive for the group to come to the right answer (I assume there was an actual payout to the participants).

I don’t see any basis for extrapolating that result to society in general. Daily life is not a series of stock picking tasks. I want to have “undue” trust that the other person will stop at a red light. I want to have experiences of solidarity with those like me, free of “cognitive friction”. Everybody does.

* In other words, this study suggests that diversity produces low trust, high conflict societies in which the stock market does really well. I.e. the world we have now.

* This study (entitled “Downsides of Social Capital”) is one of an interesting new genre. A great deal of research has demonstrated that ethnic diversity decreases neighborliness, trust and other social capital. Advocates of diversity haven’t been able to come up with any contrary evidence. So they’ve been concocting studies that try to show that destroying neighborliness and trust is actually a good thing.

* These contrived studies are moronic. We have this vast data set called ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY in which to assess the outcomes of diversity. None of it supports the assertion that diversity brings anything more positive than instability and unhappiness. Mostly it brings war, rape, slavery, and massacre. Even the most stable, or at least enduring, diverse structures, the Roman Empire, maintained its pattern through institutionalized slavery and permanent war. It’s pattern of rule by a diverse aristocracy (headed by an Emperor) endured simply through mass application of state violence. This will be the fate of the world if the Paul Ryan-type globalists win. Recalcitrant peoples like our will suffer the same fate of those in the Roman era: extirpation.

I was taught there are three rules for doing analysis: 1) look at the data 2) look at the data and 3) look at the data. I was then warned that I would be surprised by how many people did not actually LOOK at the data. Of course, being young, ignorant, and naive I didn’t believe my mentor.

Apparently it is de rigueur to NOT look at the data in leftist circles today. They contrive artificial experiments to make proxy measurements to avoid looking at the real thing right in front of their faces.

* They examine the differences between diverse and homogenous groups, but the study conveniently leaves out any results on the differences between different homogenous groups. There’s no way to see whether a homogenous white group performs better than a black group or a diverse group. All the study really shows is that a diverse group (i.e. a group with some white people) performs better than an all hispanic or all black group.

* Surely the only thing that study proves, even taken at face value, is that diversity works because people don’t trust members of other races and so feel it necessary to test their answers more thoroughly before accepting them.

I’m actually a bit surprised by that. It has never occurred to me that there are not stupid fellow white people, so I have a very hard time imagining ever trusting a randomly assigned stranger’s answer on something that could cost me money, without testing it against whatever other information I might have. If any.

Then again I never lived in a Mayberry-like environment or other tv show from the ’50s. The idea of taking investment tips from Joe down the street, without regard to facts or even whether he has any professional qualifications or demonstrable personal wealth, strikes me as insane. And yet plot after plot in shows from the Honeymooners to the Flintstones [the animated honeymooners] and beyond seemed to feature some schlub losing all his money because he got a hot stock tip from some other schlub who neither showed any evidence of financial acumen nor provided any source or analysis for the tip. At least the modern financial advice wizards dress the part, put certificates on the walls, and baffle us with diagrams. I respect them for putting in the effort.

As for non-financial matters more strictly experienced on a campus, this thesis cannot be true. Or it would have been demonstrated somewhere in real life by now.

* One more thing, a poster here published the list of the Editorial Board of the NYT, not the least bit diverse (18 members, one black, one Asian).

* “Ethnic diversity is like fresh air: It benefits everybody who experiences it.”

If diversity is like fresh air, than poor Oprah Winfrey is living in extremely polluted air. She resides in Montecito, California where only 0.6 percent of the population is Black and a whopping 92 percent of the population is White. She is choking from all of that polluted air which is a result of being surrounded by way too many White neighbors.

* Multi-ethnic empires and countries have all crashed and burned. Everywhere there’s been Muslims there’s been conflict with everyone else and between themselves so even having different religions next to each other is a formula for trouble. There’s nothing secret about this. The people who write these things need not to even have ever picked up a history book; all they need to do is look at all the current conflicts taking place right now. Diversity is actually a curse, a formula for strife and chaos.

* New York Times claiming diversity makes you smarter? Next an Islamic magazine will be claiming Islam makes your life better.

* I wonder why Oprah Winfrey never wanted to reside in Baldwin Hills and be surrounded by other rich Black people. Maybe Baldwin Hills is too close to the high crime area known as The Jungle/Baldwin Village and that scares her.

Since the Black underclass in The Jungle lives in such close proximity to the Black upper middle class in Baldwin Hills, there must be a lot of home burglaries that take place in Baldwin Hills. Higher than it should be for a supposed “affluent” area.

* Michael Burry did the opposite of schmooze when he bet against mortgages in diverse communities across the country and made himself and his investors hundreds of millions.

* To wit, when you ask a group of people to collaborate on an intellectual task, it’s effectively just asking whomever is the most intelligent to do the task on their own. Or whomever is pushiest, if there’s more than one type-A personality in the group.

* OK, they are basically rediscovering Putnam’s Bowling Alone thesis: Diversity leads to Distrust.
It leads not only to distrust of persons of other ethnicities, but of everyone, even co-ethnics.
It leads to atomization, to Bowling Alone.
Other social science discoveries demonstrate that people will go along with wrong answers to get along with the group, especially if its a low stakes test problem and they have no social, financial, moral or other skin in the game.

So, come up with a task that is kinda abstract, and where accuracy could be improved by distrust and reduced social cohesion, and it is perfectly plausible that Diversity could have this effect. Unfortunately, in the real world of Universities, this doesn’t play out. The STEM fields have other institutional methods of dealing with group think and confirmation bias, and though these are nowhere near perfect, as criticisms of peer review have shown, it is hard to believe the presence of a few black or lesbian scientists or mathematicians make the fields more open to novel string theorems. The Humanities fields are palpably hurt by Diversity, because there is VERY MUCH skin in the game, the prize being control of culture. So here Diversity leads to crushing conformity, not helpful lack thereof. Actually, I can see diversity having originally had this effect in say 1950-1965, when it was a little spice added to the mix, before the power of the diverse to control things was established. Also, in places like the military, where the Diverse aren’t visibly lesser in intelligence and ability, and so the need to hide that uncomfortable fact is less, diversity might still play that role.

* Mixing certain ingredients makes for better flavors.

But just because tomato sauce and oregano go together doesn’t mean they do so in equal amounts.

Also, most combinations don’t work. Garlic powder and ice cream, anyone?

Diversity can make us brighter. But it can make us dimmer as well.

Depends on the combo, the quantities, and the rules.

Surely a top US college with best minds from all over will be a brighter place.

But I never heard the favelas of Brazil are genius factories.

* Summary: Diversity ruins communities, ‘complicates public policy decisions’, ‘Ethnic diversity facilitates friction. This friction can increase conflict in some group settings, whether a work team, a community, or a region.’, but would someone think of the children economy(!), ‘However, in modern markets, vigilant skepticism is beneficial; over-reliance on others’ decisions is risky.’

* Back when I used to listen to Howard Stern on AM radio he would talk about being beaten up by black students at Roosevelt High school on Long Island. How he resented that his father, who had the money, did not move to a better suburban school district. So much for diversity!

And if diversity is so good for their children then why do the libs move to suburban suburbs that have a minimum of black and Hispanic students? Asian students being OK, and perhaps being smarter than their own children, and hogging the college scholarships.

* Someone who grows up in a tight-knit homogeneous culture comes to take certain things for granted.

Like “it’s safe for me to walk to the bus station” or “the guys down the street aren’t planning a terrorist attack” or “Muslims aren’t allowing strangers to rape my little sister for money with tacit police approval”.

* It seems plausible that when people all share something in common, they are more easily swayed by groupthink. When they are in diverse company, they may simply speak in the common currency of ideas.

Explains why the Royal Society was able to accomplish so little in the seventeenth century. Not enough diverse people were challenging the traditional groupthinking mindset typified by men like Boyle and Newton.

* I suffered through a required diversity seminar while employed by one of the US auto companies in the 1990′s. The basic theme was “Diversity makes companies better!!”

My boss’s boss’s boss was also present in this seminar. He was not an American citizen, and he apparently felt that he could ask some questions of the presenter.

“So, what you’re saying is that a more diverse design team would make a better car? A more popular car with bigger sales? So, if we looked at the carmakers and examined pictures of their design teams, we would be able to find the maker of the most popular, biggest-selling, most profitable family sedan? Because it would be the most diverse team?”

The presenter basically agreed.

Then the guy said “Well, if you look at the biggest selling sedan in America, you’re looking at the Toyota Camry. The design team for the Camry is the most non-diverse team you can imagine: ethnic Japanese males between the ages of 30 and 60. So how do you explain that?”

The presenter moved on to other topics.

* Isn’t the gist of this essentially that when you add a white person to a group of NAMs, the results improve?

As anyone who ever suffered through “group work” in school knows, the smartest kids end up doing all the work while the dullards goof off and then take the credit. Since everyone in America who ever went to school is perfectly familiar with this dynamic, I’m pretty sure it happened just like that in these “studies.”

I suppose there is a similar dynamic between Chinese, Indian and Malay. But bottom line, all that’s needed is inserting one smart person into a group of dolts, and you’ll get 58% better results, because the smart person carries everyone else.

Diversity: one smart guy in a bunch of idiots.

* Reading the actual paper makes it clear that the NYT summary is a very dishonest spin job.

“Diversity improves the way people think. By disrupting conformity, racial and ethnic diversity prompts people to scrutinize facts, think more deeply and develop their own opinions.

To study the effects of ethnic and racial diversity, we conducted a series of experiments in which participants competed in groups to find accurate answers to problems.”

An honest statement of the study’s results would be “students in a diverse setting trust each other less and try to take advantage of each other more”. Saying that “participants competed in groups to find accurate answers to problems” is very misleading because it suggests some sort of cooperative group project where everyone benefited from cooperation. It was the exact opposite.

Students were put in a stock-trading simulation where they could either go along with the prices they saw other students posting, or you could try to take advantage of the other students by identifying their pricing mistakes and trading so as to make money at the expense of the other students. The experiment was zero sum … one student’s gain was another student’s loss.

The stakes were very low, a few dollars. So, in the diverse groups, students were more likely to try to grab a few dollars from their fellow students whom they had just met and been encouraged to interact with.

The paper’s discussion makes clear that the results are driven by the reduced trust in the diverse groups. The paper even cites Putnam’s study, E Pluribus Unum. Like Putnam, the authors had to work hard to put a positive spin on their finding that diversity encourages ruthless backstabbing.

* What happens when you bring people from low-trust, high-corruption societies into a high-trust, low corruption society. The interesting thing is that the scammers were only discovered when “a separate terrorist investigation found payments in a bank account used by someone who later travelled to Syria.”

“Four men have been convicted over a phone scam carried out across the south of England that defrauded 18 pensioners out of a total of £600,000. Mohamed Dahir, 23, Sakaria Aden, 22, and Yasser Abukar, 24, were found guilty of conspiring to commit fraud. Mohammed Sharif Abokar, 28, was convicted at the Old Bailey of converting criminal property.

The trial heard how the victims – aged in their 70s, 80s and 90s and from Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Bedfordshire, London and Kent – were phoned by men posing as police officers supposedly investigating a fraud at the person’s bank. They were advised to transfer money or hand it over for “safekeeping”. The scam had been carried out between May 2014 and May 2015.

Three other men had already pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud before the trial started. Two others had admitted converting the proceeds of crime ahead of the trial.

Dahir’s defence barrister Patrick Harte told the court his client had a letter from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn “setting out his roots in the area” of Islington. The letter had been sent as part of Dahir’s earlier bail application, Mr Harte told the press.”

So a Muslim fraudster, arrested on charges of defrauding elderly Britons, is vouched for by the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition (he actually did get bail, and turned up for the trial, or someone did). Be interesting to see if this gets used against him, and by whom.

* Mistakes spread as participants seemingly put undue trust in others’ answers.

Right from the horse’s mouth – homogeneous groups trust each other. Multiple by 10.784 bazillion across the whole economy and then measure the gains which result from business being conducted in a high trust society compared to doing business with people you distrust and how are likely to cheat you.

* First they came for the blank and I said nothing because I wasn’t blank.
Then they came for the blank and I said nothing because I wasn’t blank.
Then they came for the blank and I said nothing because I wasn’t blank…and then everyone else lived happily ever after.

* I read somewhere, I’m sure it was the New York Times, that just being around black people and Muslims cures tuberculosis, low back pain, post nasal drip, and syphilis.

* Given the moral hazard involved in letting such journalistic malpractice stand unchallenged, any action taken to challenge it stands as a clear case of unalloyed social good.

We have two names:

Sheen Levine and David Stark

And a publication.

Do we have an editor?

To whom should we present our case?